A query language for list-based complex objects

We present a language for querying list-based complex objects. The language is shown to express precisely the polynomial-time generic list-object functions. The iteration mechanism of the language is based on a new approach wherein, in addition to the list over which the iteration is performed, a second list is used to control the number of iteration steps. During the iteration, the intermediate results can be moved to the output list as well as reinserted into the list being iterated over. A simple syntactic constraint allows the growth rate of the intermediate results to be tightly controlled which, in turn, restricts the expressiveness of the language to PTIME.

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