Thursday 1 March 2012

Queries in general-purpose programming languages

The CPRG group has informal meetings where we discuss various topics related to programming langauges including current trends in programming languages, new features or other topics that some of our members are interested in.

At the last meeting, I gave a brief presentation about query support in general-purpose programming languages. The talks does not, obviously, cover the broad range of research that has been done in the area - instead, I focused on some langauges that I'm familiar with and at features that make them interesting in some way, so I talked about LINQ (in C#), monad comprehensions in Haskell and customizable queries in F# 3.0.

The slides from the talk can be found on SlideShare:



One of the topics that are discussed in the talk is how the join clause in LINQ corresponds to the operation of applicative functors. To find out more about this topic, you can also read Beyond the Monad fashion (I.): Writing idioms in LINQ and Beyond the Monad fashion (II.): Creating web forms with LINQ on my blog.