Abstract
Although there is a great deal of academic interest in functional languages, there are very few large-scale functional applications. The poor interface to the file system seems to be a major factor preventing functional languages being used for large-scale programming tasks. The interfaces provided by some widely-used languages are described and some problems encountered with using these interfaces to access persistent data are discussed. Three means of improving the persistent data manipulation facilities of functional languages are considered: an improved interface to the file system, including a good binary file implementation; an interface to a database; and the provision of orthogonal persistence. Concrete examples are given using the functional programming language, Haskell.
This work is supported by the SERC GRASP and Bulk Data Types Projects, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellowship, and a Commonwealth Scholorship.
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© 1993 British Computer Society
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Hammond, K., McNally, D., Sansom, P.M., Trinder, P. (1993). Improving Persistent Data Manipulation for Functional Languages. In: Launchbury, J., Sansom, P. (eds) Functional Programming, Glasgow 1992. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3215-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3215-8_7
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