The database world has been primarily concerned with query languages, the dominant example being SQL. This is an unfortunate limitation, because querying is only one possible activity which can be expressed by programming, and programming languages have much more general capabilities than query languages. The main concession to programming language in the database community has been to combine query language with existing programming language, usually by an ad-hoc interface which allows the query language to be used within the programming language. This is often a clumsy solution, because of major conceptual mismatches between the two languages, leading to extra learning effort, and pain, on the part of the user. A better approach is to unify programming and query language into a general-