Confluence: The unifying, expressive power of locality

Abstract

Scientific fields undergo successive phases of specialization and unification. The field of programming languages is in a phase of specialization. Among the main programming paradigms are imperative programming, functional programming, logic programming, object oriented programming, concurrent programming and distributed programming. Each of these fields is further specialized. For example, there are many different paradigms for functional programming: LISP, Mac Carthy's original functional programming paradigm based on pure lambda-calculus for lists enriched with recursion; ML, Milner's paradigm based on a typed lambda-calculus enriched with data types, a let construct and recursion which has become a standard; O'Donnel's paradigm based on orthogonal rewriting; and OBJ, Goguen's paradigm based on terminating rewriting in first-order algebra to cite a few. Similarly, logic programming has given rise to constraint logic programming, as well as query languages for data bases. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.