[erlang-questions] Comprehensive comprehensions

[Torbjorn Tornkvist]

I wonder if any of the ideas in this paper could be
incorporated with qlc ?

http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/papers/list%2Dcomp/

The Abstract follows...

Cheers, Tobbe
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Abstract
We propose an extension to list comprehensions that makes it easy to
express the kind of queries one would write in SQL using ORDER BY, GROUP
BY, and LIMIT. Our extension adds expressive power to comprehensions,
and generalises the SQL constructs that inspired it. Moreover, it is
easy to implement, using simple desugaring rules.

For example, consider this SQL query

    SELECT dept, SUM(salary)
    FROM employees
    GROUP BY dept
    ORDER BY SUM(salary) DESCENDING
    LIMIT 5

The GROUP BY clause groups records together; the ORDER BY sorts the
departments in order of salary bill; and the LIMIT clause picks just the
first five records. This support for grouping and sorting is extremely
useful in practice, but is not available in list comprehensions.

In this paper we propose an extension to list comprehensions that makes
it easy to express the kind of queries one would write in SQL using
ORDER BY, GROUP BY, and LIMIT. Here, for example, is how the above SQL
query would be rendered in our extension.

    [ (the dept, sum salary)
    | (name, dept, salary) <- employees
    , group by dept
    , order by Down (sum salary)
    , order using take 5 ]

Moreover, our extensions are significantly more general than SQL's
facilities.
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