This is an investigation of new high-level programming language facilities for processing nonnumerical data, such as strings of characters and structured aggregates of values. Previous work has concentrated on two aspects of this problem (1) the design of new linguistic facilities for expressing operations on nonnumeric data and (2) the implementation of these facilities so that they can be evaluated and made availabel to the computing community. The research will build on past results with the focus on novel expression-evaluation mechanisms, data structures with sophisticated access mechanisms, and pattern matching. In addition, the combination of procedural, functional, and logic programming paradigms will be investigated in the context of generative expression-evaluation mechanisms with the goal of developing a more powerful and unified language framework.
