Take Everything From Me, But Leave Me the Comprehension

Torsten Grust

Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2017), Munich, Germany, September 2017.

For more than twenty years now I am roaming the frontier between the database query and programming language fields. During all that time, one trusty companion has never let me down: the comprehension. Its elegant, concise syntactic form and flexible semantics render it one of the most versatile tools in query and collection processing, analysis, transformation, and optimization. I will highlight a variety of places where the DBPL community has dependend on comprehensions — and will also point out how existing work might have turned out differently if it would have embraced comprehensions. Comprehensions glue DB and PL together. Give them a proper hug the next time you encounter them.

(Here are the slides for this invited talk.)