Language-design issues in supporting process-oriented computation in persistent environments

The problems of shared access to large bodies of information raise difficulties in the understanding and semantics of concurrency, distribution, and stability. The authors identify these difficulties and clarify them with regard to database programming language design. They propose a model of concurrency that can be used as a solution to the problems. It is based on the rendezvous of Ada and integrated with a polymorphic type system with inheritance. This yields a process-oriented approach to system construction that has much in common with the object-oriented approach. The authors demonstrate the facilities of the language Napier, which allows the integration of these two methods along with a persistent environment to provide concurrently accessed object-oriented databases