As previously mentioned, I'm currently hacking away at SQL integration. Like all native libraries in GNU APL, the system is accessed using a function number together with the variable that is bound in the ⎕FX call.
There are, however, two limitations that I would like to see addressed:
First of all, one might want to use more than one function since remembering the function numbers is a bit ugly. Secondly, one might not want to implement all of the functionality in C++. Parts of the code would be much better written in APL itself.
Thus, we need the following:
- A way to load APL code packaged in a library (the APL code initialiser could do the necessary ⎕FX calls to load the native code, if such exists)
- A way to separate symbols in different namespaces. If two libraries define functions or variables with the same name, there would be problems.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to do something like:
)LoadWhatever 'SQLite3'
db ← SQLite.init '/path/to/database'
result ← db SQLite.query 'select * from foo'
(the above shows what my current SQLite implementation would look like if we had these features)
The )LoadWhatever command would load APL code in a similar way as the -f flag does when starting the interpreter.
Regards,
Elias