DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF FLORA, A LANGUAGE FOR OBJECT ALGEBRA

Flora is a language for implementing object-oriented databases. As suc h, it is not intended to be a user language, but rather, an intermedia te language capable of supporting a variety of higher-level languages and applications. Flora provides a very general data model with comple x values and complex objects, constructs for specifying data storage, and a functional-style action language that incorporates set processin g operations and a user-defined function capability. Thus, Flora provi des the building blocks that allow the calling language to appropriate ly model higher-level constructs such as classes and inheritance, and to build complex queries in a manner that readily supports various opt imization schemes.