Combining Functional and Logical Features

Appeared in Volume 9/4, November 1996

fr1@irz.inf.tu-dresden.de
Frank Reiber
30th January 1996

I am doing research on the advantages of combining functional, logical, and constraint programming. What literature is there on this topic? Are there any representative examples, applications, etc. which clearly show the advantages of the combination.

jampel@cs.city.ac.uk
Michael Jampel
31st January 1996

For the combination of functional and LP (I am not certain about constraints), look for papers written by Michael Hanus (hanus@informatik.rwth-aachen.de). His home page is http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/hanus/

For the combination of functional programming and constraints, papers written by Darlington and Guo, of Imperial College may be helpful. John Darlington's email address is jd@doc.ic.ac.uk.

Some papers by both these groups are mentioned in the CLP bibliography:

ftp://ftp.cs.city.ac.uk/pub/constraints/bibliography
http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/archive/constraints/constraints.html

but it is not very up-to-date in this respect. I would be happy to receive newer information.

reiter@netspace.net.au
Peter Moulder
31st January 1996

Take a look at LIFE: Logic, Inheritance, Functions, and Equations, at:
http://www.isg.sfu.ca/life/

LIFE (Logic, Inheritance, Functions, and Equations) is an experimental programming language which integrates three orthogonal programming paradigms proven useful for symbolic computation. From the programmer's standpoint, it may be perceived as a language derived from LP, FP, and OOP.

Bruno.Dumant@issy.cnet.fr
Bruno Dumant
31st January 1996

You should have a look at the Proceedings of the "Workshop on Programming Paradigms in Graphics" (see http://www.cwi.nl/Eurographics/WorkshopReports/wsppg95.html).

It attempts to answer your question in the field of computer graphics for a wider range of languages (object-oriented, functional, constraint, parallel, logic, data-flow, genetic, etc).

I co-wrote a paper on the graphical toolkit provided with the Life language (mentioned above) which was published in the latest edition of the Proceedings (September 1995).