Attribute assignment view of non-procedural computing systems

Abstract

This paper gives an attribute assignment view of the interpretation and evaluation of non-procedural computing systems. We first show that a number of non-procedural computing systems such as Prolog, Wijngaarden grammars, and attribute grammars can be viewed as attribute assignment systems in spite of their different original motivations. An attribute assignment view is a natural common abstraction of these non-procedural computing systems. We then show that our attribute assignment view enables us to have a new evaluation method in a restricted case where every attribute has finite domains. This evaluation method is based on set-theoretic operations. This evaluation method has a feature that the performance is fairly stable even in worst cases.