                                 Muldis::D
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Following is a summary of things that still need doing.  It is specific to
the Muldis D specification distribution only, and doesn't talk about things
that would go in other distributions, including implementations.  (But,
look at lib/Muldis/D/SeeAlso.pod for a list of actual or possible
implementations.)

Alternately, this list deals with possible ideas to explore, which may or
may not be good ideas to pursue.

The following list is loosely ordered by priority, but list items may
actually be addressed in a different order.  There is no specific time
table for these items; they are simply to be done "as soon as possible".

* Generally speaking, make a new release to CPAN once every week, assuming
the progress is non-trivial, so there are regular public snapshots with
nicely rendered documentation.

* Consider changing the keywords in system-defined routine signatures,
specifically [result, params, update, read], to something better sounding.

* The built-in routines and types are now actually all named into the
'sys.std' and 'sys.imp' namespaces but most documentation calls those two
'sys' and 'imp' respectively.  So we need to update the documentation to
the new slightly longer names, but we should defer that change until we are
also changing all type/routine/etc signatures in some other way, such as
for the previous todo item.  Meanwhile some items may move over piecemeal.

* Overhaul and expand the catalog types for defining data types, whole
database constraints, virtual relvars, triggered routines, etc.

* Add a system-defined function that will take a function name as a normal
data argument and then turns around and invokes that function.  This is the
fundamental function over which the generic relational restriction operator
or map operator or reduce operator et al works.  Note that while the needs
of those functions could be addressed as special catalog node syntax rather
than an actual function, we go the function route so that users can define
their own operators that invoke based on data.  Similarly add a
system-defined procedure, which is what try_catch et al works over for
calling named procedures.

* Add some automatic code completion to the two Tiny dialects or as a
general function, mainly so that tuples comprising catalogs don't have to
be written out in full; attributes may be omitted by the coders but will be
automatically added with default attribute values at parsing time, when
converting Muldis D source from the Tiny dialect to the actual catalog.  As
far as the Muldis D catalog is concerned, the users had always written them
out in full.  Specific use case example is that programmers can omit
'comment' attributes, or empty sets of expression nodes that aren't used.

* Take advantage of the fact that a scalar possrep looks just like a tuple.
We need to add at least 6 generic sys.Core.Scalar.\w+ functions.  The first
2 respectively extract all possrep attrs at once as a tuple, or select a
scalar value where the selector has a single tuple-typed parameter to
specify all the possrep attrs.  Another 2 will respectively extract or
update a single possrep attr, as per the Tuple.\w+ functions 'attr',
'update_attr'.  Another 2 will extract|update an arbitrary subset of
possrep attrs as per the Tuple.\w+ functions 'project', 'multi_update'.
For that matter, add an analogue to Tuple.substitution_in_default as well.

* Add a new extension, perhaps ext/Patterns.pod, which does
pattern-sensitive search and/or replace in Text values, including both the
full feature set of SQL's LIKE operator (not just the special case of
matching a static substring once), as well as full regular expression
support such as grep or Perl et al support, or simple transliterations.
This new extension is meant to be algorithm-agnositic and can both be
plugged with new algorithms or have multiple system-defined ones, as per
Perl 5.10 now supports plugins that substitute for its builtin regexp
engines.

* Generalize the operator set for controlled character string degrading, of
which upper/lower case folding is one example, and of which removing
accents or combining characters with base characters is another, and of
which trimming or normalizing runs of whitespace is another.  Yet another
is converting data from a larger character repetoire to a smaller one eg,
anything to ASCII, where we want for example range-external characters to
be either deleted or changed to certain other characters.  Any
features-to-be like case-insensitive or accent-insensitive comparisons
(over which keys or indexes could be built) needs to be done this way; you
don't simply treat non-identical things as being equal; you actually change
them so they are.  These features are possibly useable not just with user
data, but also database entity names on underlying systems that are eg not
case sensitive but case preserving and we want to retain those semantics
for some reason of backwards compatibility.

* Add relational operators for sorting and quota queries; that is,
analogues to SQL's ORDER BY and LIMIT tasks, as well as order-significant
aggregate operations on relation attributes (eg, catenate).  Consider
overhauling the nature of the Ordered role and/or generic comparison or
sorting operators.

* Define more flow control operators like IF/ELSE, GIVEN/WHEN, etc.  Both
functional and imperative versions.

* Define short-hand data definition procedures analagous to SQL's CREATE,
ALTER, DROP etc.  Note that these are not short-hand for inserting records
into catalogs, at least when the code doing either is an updater or
procedure.  Rather, these procedures are mainly for making bootloaders
work, since those can not directly invoke variables such as the catalogs in
order to insert into them.

* Flesh out and add system service operators like random numbers or current
dates or simple generic I/O.

* Overhaul the temporal data types, provide operators for them.

* Likewise with spatial data types.

* Whatever else needs doing, such as, fixing bugs.
