It is called data-oriented, but most part is about typing, a clever mixture of static and dynamic. Note that also a language like C# has a mixture of dynamic and static types. At least you can define all sort of values without having to specify an explicit type. I do not know how far C# goes into defining methods and functions over those types.
What are the semantics of assignment? Is is creating a reference or does it 'clone' the value. In some languages, it is always a reference, except if you explicitly create a clone. In some languages with immutable data structures, it is always a copy (or at least, it behaves like that).
I am asking this, because I have found this a common source of errors, which are often hard to debug, because at someplace in the program a reference is created where a copy was intended and that in some other part of the program, a change is being made with unexpected side effects.
In some relational database it is possible to define existence constraints and define cascading deletes. For example, if I remove an author from a database, it also causes to remove all books written by that author. Or you could define the constraint that an author cannot be removed, if there is still a book written by that author in the database. I feel that a 'data oriented' language should also focus on these aspects of data.
I started to develop a (still dynamically typed) data oriented language myself. It is still very premature without any implementation, but a description can be found at https://github.com/FransFaase/DataLang
What are the semantics of assignment? Is is creating a reference or does it 'clone' the value. In some languages, it is always a reference, except if you explicitly create a clone. In some languages with immutable data structures, it is always a copy (or at least, it behaves like that).
I am asking this, because I have found this a common source of errors, which are often hard to debug, because at someplace in the program a reference is created where a copy was intended and that in some other part of the program, a change is being made with unexpected side effects.
In some relational database it is possible to define existence constraints and define cascading deletes. For example, if I remove an author from a database, it also causes to remove all books written by that author. Or you could define the constraint that an author cannot be removed, if there is still a book written by that author in the database. I feel that a 'data oriented' language should also focus on these aspects of data.
I started to develop a (still dynamically typed) data oriented language myself. It is still very premature without any implementation, but a description can be found at https://github.com/FransFaase/DataLang