I had this idea this morning, and was thinking about how to implement it when it occurred to me somebody has probably already done this. I searched but found nothing, here's my idea:
In short, all variable storage is stored in persistent storage. I don't mean battery backed up RAM. I mean more like a database.
To use common technologies to explain what I mean: Lets say you were to use an SQL database for this persistent storage. An array/list would be stored as a table with one column. An ordered list would be stored as two columns with the first being a sequence number. A hash would be a table with two columns, the first being the key, the second being the value. All simple stuff. But what I'm getting at is that you could do large data moving/calculating/reporting operations with native language constructs without all that mucking about in hyper... I mean without all that SQL and loading data from the database. I was thinking sort of like the way you can do matrix math in APL. It would be native to the language and all the underpinning storage would just work. And in reality it would use a record manager more than a SQL database. That was just to explain.
Of course this would be horribly slow, but solid state disk is getting bigger faster and cheaper, so this might not be as unwieldy as it might first seem.
Anyway, is this a novel idea or has somebody done this before?
MUMPS has something like that.
Database interaction is transparently built into the language. The MUMPS language provides a hierarchical database made up of persistent sparse arrays, which is implicitly “opened” for every MUMPS application. All variable names prefixed with the caret character (“
^”) use permanent (instead of RAM) storage, will maintain their values after the application exits, and will be visible to (and modifiable by) other running applications.
Of course, it’s explicit—thus not applied to all variables—but still automatic.