Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate a type system for databases and object-oriented programming and to design a statically typed programming language for these applications. Such a language should ideally have a static type system that supports: • polymorphism and static type inference, • rich data structures and operations to represent various data models for databases including the relational model and more recent complex object models, • central features of object-oriented programming including user definable class hierarchies, multiple inheritance, and data abstraction, • the notion of extents and object-identities for object-oriented databases. Without a proper formalism, it is not obvious that the construction of such a type system is possible. This thesis attempts to construct one such formalism and proposes a programming language that uniformly integrate all of the above features. The specific contributions of this thesis include: • A simple semantics for ML polymorphism and axiomatization of the equational theory of ML. • A uniform generalization of the relational model to arbitrary complex database objects that

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