Logic engines as interactors

Abstract

We introduce a new programming language construct, Interactors, supporting the agent-oriented view that programming is a dialog between simple, self-contained, autonomous building blocks. We define Interactors as an abstraction of answer generation and refinement in Logic Engines resulting in expressive language extension and metaprogramming patterns. Interactors extend language constructs like Ruby, Python and C#'s multiple coroutining block returns through yield statements and they can emulate the action of monadic constructs and catamorphisms in functional languages. The full version of this paper [1] describes source level emulation of Prolog's dynamic database and various built-ins in terms of an Interactor API and design patterns for algorithms involving combinatorial generation and infinite answer streams. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.