Harmony: The Art of Reconciliation

[429836]和谐：协调的艺术本杰明·c·皮尔斯这个项目旨在构建一个通用的工具，用于协调断开连接的更新到异构的、结构化的、复制的数据——例如，用于同步运行在多台机器上的不同web浏览器的书签文件。一个中心主题是将编程语言的思想引入到通常被认为属于数据库或分布式系统范围的问题中。特别是，一个主要的焦点是发展“双向编程语言”的基础，其中每个程序都表示一对函数——一个用于提取某些复杂数据结构的视图，另一个用于将更新后的视图放回原始结构中。类似地，对账期间的信息对齐问题将通过关注被对账数据的类型结构来解决。这种语言学的观点可能会为这些领域的经典问题提供新的见解，例如数据库中众所周知的“视图更新问题”。与此同时，协调复杂的抽象格式，如有序列表和树，带来了许多关于如何有意义地将副本中不相关的更改编织在一起的算法问题。

0429836Harmony: The Art of ReconciliationBenjamin C. PierceThis project aims to build a generic tool for reconciling disconnectedupdates to heterogeneous, structured, replicated data -- usable, forinstance, to synchronize bookmark files from different web browsersrunning on multiple machines.A central theme is bringing ideas from programming languages to bear onproblems more commonly regarded as belonging to the purview of databasesor distributed systems. In particular, a major focus concernsdeveloping the foundations of "bi-directional programming languages," inwhich every program denotes a pair of functions -- one for extracting aview of some complex data structure, and another for putting back anupdated view into the original structure. Similarly, the issue ofalignment of information during reconciliation will be addressed byfocusing on the type structure of the data being reconciled. Thislinguistic perspective may offer new insights into classical problems inthese areas, such as the well known "view update problem" in databases.At the same time, reconciling complex abstract formats, such as orderedlists and trees, brings to fore a number of algorithmic issuesconcerning how to meaningfully weave together disconnected changes inreplicas.