id: 00219197
dt: a
an: 00219197
au: Ohori, Atsushi
ti: Representing object identity in a pure functional language.
so: Database theory, Proc. 3rd Int. Conf., ICDT ’90, Paris/Fr. 1990, Lect.
    Notes Comput. Sci. 470, 41-55 (1990).
py: 1990
pu: Berlin etc.: Springer-Verlag
la: EN
cc: 
ut: type system of programming language; object-oriented databases; semantics;
    database programming; typed pure functional languages; object identity;
    set data types
ci: Zbl 0759.00004
li: 
ab: Summary: [For the entire collection see Zbl 0759.00004.] One of the central
    concepts in the field of object-oriented databases is object identity,
    which nicely captures mutability, sharing and cyclic structures.
    Although the concept is intuitively clear, its precise semantics has
    not yet been well established. This seems to be a major obstacle to
    achieve a clean integration of object-oriented databases and other
    paradigms of database programming in a modern type system of a
    programming language. This paper attempts to establish a mathematical
    model for object identity in a framework of typed pure functional
    languages. We argue that the properties of object identity are
    accurately captured by references as they are implemented in Standard
    $ML$. We then present a method to interpret an impure higher-order
    functional language with references in a typed pure functional language
    using Moggi’s recent result on the categorical structure of monads.
    This establishes a precise semantics to the primitive operations for
    references and allows us to analyze various properties of object
    identity. We investigate the interaction between set data types and
    object identity. Since the interpretation is shown to preserve all the
    properties of the existing data structures for databases, it enables us
    to integrate object identity with various existing data models within a
    type system of a programming language. We show that object identity and
    a generalized relational model can be uniformly integrated in a
    programming language.
rv: