Ivory - A declarative programming system.
An experimental data centred programming system that aims to support a declarative style of programming, permitting both the structure of applications and their data to be represented in the same way.
The main rationale behind the system is that existing approaches don't really address the challenge of dynamic data - so a different approach is needed.
It is very difficult to find programming tools that permit the full range of language data types to be stored persistently, so that seamless applications can be created. We see this everywhere, and particularly obvious examples are Linux and Windows boot phases where initial state data is maintained in specific formats, say XML. The result is that what should take milliseconds, in fact takes seconds or minutes stemming from the additional parsing processing overhead. The Ivory System demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to avoid this by maintaining the data directly. The key feature is that support for multiple contexts (e.g. identifiers and data types) is integral; this can't be bolted onto existing languages. A summary list of the main features is:
- Native support for dynamic data structures and types in multiple contexts
- Higher order data types, including unevaluated expressions
- Static and run-time type checking
- Independent data stores offering uniform presentation of data
- Data representation and processing efficiency
- Adoption of functional programming technologies
- Component based modelling
- Rule based scalability
- Native code execution via a C++ code generator
- Interpreted code execution via a byte code generator
Last update: 27 July, 2008
