[Haskelldb-users] Opinions/Guidance wanted for starting an undergraduate project

[<adr...@ya...>]

Hi.  I'm new to Haskell but am exploring the
possibilities for extending the functionality of
functional programming languages in for my
undergraduate 3rd year project.  Along with graphical
user interfaces databases seems one area where
functional languages are typically less developed than
imperative languages.  While reading C J Date's
classic book I was inspired by the example of Datalog
applied to logic programming to think about similar
correspondences between relational databases and
functional programming, and realize that such
correlations are strong.  I’m looking to build a
pre-compiler and database access extension for a
mainstream functional language, based upon relational
algebra and the essence of types, tuples, etc. as
opposed to an SQL wrapper.  Then I came across
HaskellDB and realized that this has already been
done!  I also dug out some old papers which
integrate the functional paradigm and databases even
closer, such as FDM/DAPLEX (Shipman, 1981) and FQL
(Buneman, 1979).  In a nutshell: Buneman reduces all
database queries into terms of functional composition,
mapping, filtering and tuple building without loosing
much clarity!  There appear to be three possibilities
for where I could go from here:

1)Do you (the developers, including Dr Leijen) have
any particular applications which you’d like to see
HaskellDB put to use for?  Perhaps one of these will
inspire me to head off in a different direction.
 
2)Investigate the possibilities for taking the
HaskellDB project further in some way.
 
3)The most ambitious and my favourite option: To
start from scratch at implementing something based
upon
similar principles to HaskellDB in NJ
SML/MLj/Java/JDBC or SML.NET/J# and javacc or SML
(which is much more the domain of my existing skills
set).  My supervisor has some reservations, and asks
how much HaskellDB relies on laziness, in determining
whether this is practical?  The documentation on
HaskellDB seems a little sparse (with me being new to
Haskell syntax as well!). How are you modelling the
“dynamism” of a database?  Meaning: when [say] an
insert operation is performed do you return “a new
database”?  If so, what happens if you try to
perform an operation using a variable which still
points to “the old database”?

(P.S: I haven’t actually managed to get a working copy
of HaskellDB installed yet.  GHC compiles under
Mandrake but fails to work.  HSQL - both Windows
binary and compiling from sources under Cygwin both
fail to work. :( )

Regards,

Adrian Hudnott



	
	
		
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