Functional logic programming

Abstract

The evolution of programming languages is the stepwise introduction of abstractions hiding the underlying computer hardware and the details of program execution. Assembly languages introduce mnemonic instructions and symbolic labels for hiding machine codes and addresses. Fortran introduces arrays and expressions in standard mathematical notation for hiding registers. Algol-like languages introduce structured statements for hiding gotos and jump labels. Object-oriented languages introduce visibility levels and encapsulation for hiding the representation of data and the management of memory. Along these lines, declarative languages-the most prominent representatives of which are functional and logic languages-hide the order of evaluation by removing assignment and other control statements. A declarative program is a set of logical statements describing properties of the application domain. The execution of a declarative program is the computation of the value(s) of an expression with. © 2010 ACM.