[cap-talk] How desirable / feasible is a persistent OCAP language?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 11:10 -0700, ihab.awad at gmail.com wrote:


> Interesting. The argument on the other side, of course, is that people
> miss having Turing complete semantics to express the invariants and
> internal relationships within that alleged type system. Hence database
> triggers (horror!) and PL/SQL (septuple horror!).

Yes, but if you actually have such a turing-complete constraint
language, you discover that *that* has limitations too:

See Benjamin Pierce's "Types Considered Harmful":

  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/harmful-mfps.pdf

Pierce is "the" guy on type systems.

Now if you *really* want to get your head bent out of shape, try to work
in a dependent kind system...


shap