Supporting database access in the Hermes programming language

The work reported in this paper is part of a project aimed at designing and prototyping an application development environment that allows easy development of platform-independent distributed applications. The main goals of the database subproject are to investigate methods for (1) providing (SQL) database access and (2) supporting transaction management within a distributed programming environment based on the paradigm of communicating sequential processes. This paper looks at how SQL database access can be provided in Hermes, a new language for distributed programming based on this paradigm. The paper compares the characteristics of Hermes and SQL tables, discusses potential ways of supporting database access in Hermes, and then defines an embedding of SQL in Hermes. Some implementation aspects are also discussed.