Integrating a network-structured database into an object-oriented programming language

  • Authors:

  • Ira Goldstein

  • Affiliations:

  • Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1980 workshop on Data abstraction, databases and conceptual modeling
  • Year:
  • 1980

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Abstract

Smalltalk is an object-oriented language (Ingalls78, KayGoldberg77, Hewitt73). PIE is a subsystem that extends Smalltalk's descriptive power by supporting the creation, storage, retrieval and manipulation of network structures (GoldsteinBobrow80a,b,c; BobrowGoldstein80). These networks have been employed to represent software, documentation, electronic mail, calendars, people, addresses, bibliographic references and other items that together comprise the personal information space of a user of an office information system. By employing a common network representation, PIE supports an integrated environment for software development and office-related tasks. PIE has been developed collaboratively with Dan Bobrow, and is presently being used on an experimental basis by a small community at Xerox PARC. Smalltalk represents entities in the external world as objects. An object has a state—i.e. an assignment of values to a set of state variables—and a class. The class of an object defines the behavior of the object in terms of a set of methods. Thus the class is a generic description of a collection of objects, while the objects associated with a class provide a particular description of the state of individual instances.