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Summary: Galileo: A Strongly-Typed, Interactive
Conceptual Language
ANTONIO ALBANO
Universita' di Pisa
LUCA CARDELLI
AT&T Bell Laboratories
AND
RENZO ORSINI
Universita' di Pisa
Galileo, a programming language for database applications, is presented. Galileo is a strongly-typed,
interactive programming language designed specifically to support semantic data model features
(classification, aggregation, and specialization), as well as the abstraction mechanisms of modern
programming languages (types, abstract types, and modularization). The main contributions of Galileo
are (a) a flexible type system to model database structure and semantic integrity constraints; (b) the
inclusion of type hierarchies to support the specialization abstraction mechanisms of semantic data
models; (c) a modularization mechanism to structure data and operations into interrelated units (d)
the integration of abstraction mechanisms into an expression-based language that allows interactive
use of the database without resorting to a new stand-alone query language.
Galileo will be used in the immediate future as a tool for database design and, in the long term, as
a high-level interface for DBMSs.
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