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• Main Authors: Antonio Albano, Luca Cardelli
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Categories and Subject Descriptors; D.3.3 [Programming Languages; Language Constructs- abstract data types; data types and structures; H.2.1 [Database Management; Logical Design- data models; schema and subschema; H.2.3 [Database Management; Languages-data description languages (DDW; data manipulation languages (DML; query languages General Terms; Design; Languages Additional Key Words and Phrases; Type hierarchy; database semantics; integrity constraints; exception handling; DML
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.582.7560; http://www.dsi.unive.it/~orsini/documenti/p230-albano.pdf

Galileo, a programming language for database applications, is presented. Galileo is a strongly-typed, interactive programming language designed specifically to support semantic data model features (classification, aggregation, and specialization), as well as the abstraction mechanisms of modern programming languages (types, abstract types, and modularization). The main contributions of Galileo are (a) a flexible type system to model database structure and semantic integrity constraints; (b) the inclusion of type hierarchies to support the specialization abstraction mechanisms of semantic data models; (c) a modularization mechanism to structure data and operations into interrelated units (d) the integration of abstraction mechanisms into an expression-based language that allows interactive use of the database without resorting to a new stand-alone query language. Galileo will be used in the immediate future as a tool for database design and, in the long term, as a high-level interface for DBMSs.