Pattern by example: Type-driven visual Programming of XML queries

Véronique Benzaken, Giuseppe Castagna, Dario Colazzo, Cédric Miachon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We present Pattern-by-Example (PBE), a graphical language that allows users with little or no knowledge of pattern-matching and functional programming to define complex and optimized queries on XML documents. We demonstrate the key features of PBE by commenting an interactive session and then we present its semantics by formally defining a translation from PBE graphical queries into CQL ones. The advantages of the approach are twofold. First, it generates queries that are provably correct with respect to types: the type of the result is displayed to the user and this constitutes a first and immediate visual check of the semantic correctness of the resulting query. The second advantage is that a semantics formally-thus, unambiguously-defined is an important advancement over some current approaches in which standard usage and learning methods are based on "trial and error" techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPPDP'08 - Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming
Pages131-142
Number of pages12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Dec 2008
Externally publishedYes
EventPPDP 2008: 10th International ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 15 Jul 200817 Jul 2008

Publication series

NamePPDP'08 - Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

Conference

ConferencePPDP 2008: 10th International ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period15/07/0817/07/08

Keywords

  • Database programming languages
  • Functional programming
  • Type systems
  • Visual programming

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