Re: Scheme is too complicated

[David Welton <davidw@gate.cks.com>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 1998 at 08:17:45AM -0500, Russ McManus wrote:
> David Welton <davidw@gate.cks.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 1998 at 11:17:54AM -0500, Russell McManus wrote:
> > > 
> > > See http://idt.net/~mcmanus for a Sybase dblib interface for guile.
> > 
> > Before everyone goes off and writes drivers for their favorite DB,
> > would it not be a good idea to learn from history, and try and create
> > a standard sort of DB interface, like Perl's DBI?  I think Python has
> > something like this as well...  Things would be easier if we did this
> > now, instead of writing a zillion different drivers willy nilly.
> 
> Generally, I don't like to hear people discouraging others from
> writing useful code.  But I agree that it would be nice to have a
> programming layer that is portable across db interfaces, and that it
> would probably save overall work if that layer was defined sooner
> rather than later.  A survey of existing work is the right place to
> start when trying to define this portable layer.

If you want - look at it this way - I am encouraging people to write
*more* code - their db drivers, and an abstraction layer;-) I think I
might take a stab at a postgresql driver, but the abstraction layer I
wouldn't touch - I know way too little about scheme.

> I don't know ODBC or any of the database interfaces that support
> cursors, so I use a very simple interface to the database from scheme.
> The operations that are supported in my interface are basically these:

Perl and (maybe?) Python have good examples of how this all might
work.  I really can't offer much more than that, unfortunately, as I
don't know scheme all that well.  I might try and do the C part of a
postgresql implementation, but I'd like to encourage development of a
standard first.  

Thanks,
-- 
David Welton                          http://www.efn.org/~davidw 

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