Galileo: A strongly typed, interactive conceptual language

ABSTRACT Galileo, a programming language for database applications, is presented. Galileo is a strongly typed, interactive programming language designed specifically to support Semantic Data Model features (classification, aggregation and specialization) as well as abstraction mechanisms of modern programming languages (types, abstract types and modularization). The main contributions of Galileo are: a) the proposal of a flexible type system to model database structure and semantic integrity constraints; b) the inclusion of type hierarchies to support the specialization abstraction mechanism of Semantic Data Models. c) the proposal of a modularization mechanism to structure data and operations into interrelated units; d) the integration of the abstraction mechanisms into an expression based language that allows an interactive use of the database without resorting to a new stand alone query language. Galileo will be used in the immediate future as a tool for database design and, in the long term, as a high level interface for DBMSs