Re: Scheme is too complicated

[Russ McManus <russell.mcmanus@gs.com>]

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.

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:

1. create a connection to the database server.
2. send sql to the server.
3. process results.  to process results, the user provides two 1-ary
   procedures.  the first 1-ary proc is a row handler.  a row is a
   vector holding data values for each column.  the second 1-ary proc
   gets called with the column headings once at the beginning of each
   set of results.

Voila, a database interface.

-russ

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. 
But, in practice, there is.