On the Development of Table Oriented Programming with o++o

The paper describes the essential steps in the so-far development of o++o. It started with some papers on the Relational data model, SQL, and CONVERT. Further, it was based on my PhD on a powerful algebraic specification language. The objects of our data model o++o will be described in detail. The operations of the data model were designed step by step, often redesigned, when other operations were introduced or changed. This holds also for the objects. The essential redefinition of tabments was influenced by XML and XQuery. It is demonstrated that a lot of problems can be formulated very compactly. The next-recursion is not as powerful as general recursive functions, but this kind of recursion seems to be easier to understand because all intermediated steps are gathered in a table. The bill of the material problem is solved in a new way with o++o-numbers and a slightly changed recursive operation nextonr. o++o allows querying and visualizing not only fact- but also (structured) text data in combination. Further, an example in a few lines, which requires in EXCEL more than 6 working sheets is presented. Then a very simple to use operation cross is introduced. It allows to creation of structured pivot tables. Small companies often don’t like to use database systems, because of their high complexity in usage. Finally, an example is presented that a query on many files can be formulated also in a compact way.