Back to work: lists
After a lengthened week-end (for anyone who likes Scottish nature, the Cairngorm mountains is the right place to go), I came back to work late today. I started looking for the right way to add collections to SLinks by checking out the references about collections in various Kleisli papers.
I am not quite sure how to do it yet: in Kleisli, the core operators are very limited, and are not sufficient by themselves (for example, there is no operator to extract an element of a list). The language becomes useful when used with it's 'external primitives': but there are many of them (26 just for lists). I have to find a compromise: a small number of core operators but with sufficient expressive power. Furthermore, with the database access part in mind, I probably should consider it's particular needs: using only the 'cons', 'head' and 'tail' operators, even though they would be sufficient, do not seem very suitable to produce an SQL mapping.