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Abstract:

Values of existing typed programming languages are increasingly generated and manipulated outside the language jurisdiction. Instead, they often occur as fragments of XML documents, where they are uniformly interpreted as labelled trees in spite of their domain-specific semantics. In particular, the values are divorced from the high-level type with which they are conveniently, safely, and efficiently manipulated within the language. We propose language-specific mechanisms which extract language values from arbitrary XML documents and inject them in the language. In particular, we provide a general framework for the formal interpretation of extraction mechanisms and then instantiate it to the definition of a mechanism for a sample language core L. We prove that such mechanism can be built by giving a sound and complete algorithm that implements it. The values, types, and type semantics of L are sufficiently general to show that extraction mechanisms can be defined for many existing typed languages, including objectoriented languages. In fact, extraction mechanisms for a large class of existing languages can be directly derived from L's. As a proof of this, we introduce the SNAQue prototype system, which transforms XML fragments into CORBA objects and exposes them across the ORB framework to any CORBA-compliant language.

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