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Oriented equational clauses as a programming language

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Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 1984)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 172))

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Abstract

In the Prolog language, Horn clauses of first-order logic are regarded as programs, and the resolution procedure is used as an interpreter.

In this paper, we present the formalism of Horn oriented equational clauses (Horn clauses with a rewrite rule as the head part, and a list of equations as the body part). We show that such a formalism can be interpreted as a logic language with built-in equality, and that a procedure, based on clausal superposition, can be used as an interpreter.

We define, the operational, model-theoretic and fixpoint semantics of the language, and prove their equivalence.

Then we point out the advantages of such a programming language:

  • embodying Prolog,

  • mixing functional and relational features,

  • handling the equality relation

Lastly, we present experiments performed with an implemented interpreter.

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Jan Paredaens

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© 1984 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fribourg, L. (1984). Oriented equational clauses as a programming language. In: Paredaens, J. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1984. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 172. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-13345-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-13345-3_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-13345-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-38886-9

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