On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 5 July 2017 at 01:22, Jason Dusek <jason.dusek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi All, >> >> This more of a general interest than specifically Postgres question. Are >> there any “semi-imperative” query languages that have been tried in the >> past? I’m imagining a language where something like this: >> >> for employee in employees: >> for department in department: >> if employee.department == department.department and >> department.name == "infosec": >> yield employee.employee, employee.name, employee.location, >> employee.favorite_drink >> >> would be planned and executed like this: >> >> SELECT employee.employee, employee.name, employee.location, >> employee.favorite_drink >> FROM employee JOIN department USING (department) >> WHERE department.name == "infosec" >> >> The only language I can think of that is vaguely like this is Fortress, in >> that it attempts to emulate pseudocode and Fortran very closely while being >> fundamentally a dataflow language. > > It's probably of broader interest to consider some sort of "more relational" > language that would, in effect, be "more declarative" as opposed to > "more imperative" than SQL. (I'd not be keen on heading back to > CODASYL!!!) > > The notable example of such would be the "Tutorial D" language > attributable to Darwen and Date's "Third Manifesto" > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification) > http://wiki.c2.com/?TutorialDee > > Unfortunately, the attempts to construct implementations of D > have all pretty much remained at the "toy" point, experiments > that few beyond the implementors seem to treat as realistic > SQL successors. > > Another option, in principle, would be to consider QUEL, which > was what Stonebraker used initially as the query languages for > Ingres and Postgres. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages > > None of these options seem to be dominantly better than SQL, > and for something to supplant SQL, it would need to be a > fair bit better. I'd like to see a SQL variant (maybe preprocessed) with an algebraic syntax. My biggest gripes with SQL are all the keywords (there are other spoken languages than English??) and the unnecessarily irregular syntax. merlin -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
