Integrating Logic Rules with Everything Else, Seamlessly

TL;DR

This paper introduces Alda, a unified language integrating logic rules, sets, functions, updates, and objects, with a formal semantics, implementation, and successful application across diverse domains.

Contribution

Alda provides a seamless integration of logic rules with other programming constructs, supported by formal semantics and an efficient implementation.

Findings

Formal semantics of Alda established

Prototype compiler successfully implemented

Effective on diverse application benchmarks

Abstract

This paper presents a language, Alda, that supports all of logic rules, sets, functions, updates, and objects as seamlessly integrated built-ins. The key idea is to support predicates in rules as set-valued variables that can be used and updated in any scope, and support queries using rules as either explicit or implicit automatic calls to an inference function. We have defined a formal semantics of the language, implemented a prototype compiler that builds on an object-oriented language that supports concurrent and distributed programming and on an efficient logic rule system, and successfully used the language and implementation on benchmarks and problems from a wide variety of application domains. We describe the compilation method and results of experimental evaluation.