SEL Version 2

Appeared in Volume 8/3, August 1993

Keywords: sets.

Announcing a novel declarative language called SEL for set processing. Its main features are:

subset and equational program clauses (hence the name SEL);
pattern matching over sets (supports efficient iteration over sets);
annotations to say which functions distribution over union in which args (for point-wise/incremental computation over sets);
defining transitive closures through circular constraints (implemented by mixed top-down/memoization and bottom-up strategy);
meta-programming and simple higher-order programming
modest user-interface including tracing

The language seems well-suited to a number of problems in graph theory, program analysis, and discrete mathematics. The SEL compiler is written in Quintus Prolog. It generates WAM-like code, extended to deal with set-matching, memoization, and the novel control structure of the language. The run-time system is written in C.

You can get the system by anonymous FTP from:
ftp://ftp.cs.buffalo.edu/users/bharat/SEL2

The FTP release comes with a user manual, bibliography of papers (including .dvi files), several sample programs, and source code.