[Haskell-cafe] Re: Interesting feature

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2008 02:57:25 -0700 (PDT), fero
<frantisek.kocun at gmail.com> wrote:

If you are interested in logic programming in a language with some
similarity to Haskell, you might also wish to investigate the strongly
typed logic programming language Godel (see
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~bowers/goedel.html).  When I first saw an
example of the code, I was surprised that, unlike Prolog, the language
was strongly typed, and supported modules, and (albeit very loosely)
resembled Haskell, except that it was a logic programming language.

Here is an example of a program in Godel to compute a greatest common
divisor (note the strong typing and usage of a module system) (see
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~bowers/goedel-example.html):

MODULE      GCD.

IMPORT      Integers.

PREDICATE   Gcd : Integer * Integer * Integer.

Gcd(i,j,d) <-
            CommonDivisor(i,j,d) &
            ~ SOME [e] (CommonDivisor(i,j,e) & e > d).

PREDICATE   CommonDivisor : Integer * Integer * Integer.

CommonDivisor(i,j,d) <-
            IF (i = 0 \/ j = 0)
            THEN
              d = Max(Abs(i),Abs(j))
            ELSE
              1 =< d =< Min(Abs(i),Abs(j)) &
              i Mod d = 0 &
              j Mod d = 0.

According to the home page for the language, 

> Go"del is a declarative, general-purpose programming language in the family of 
> logic programming languages. It is a strongly typed language, the type system 
> being based on many-sorted logic with parametric polymorphism. It has a 
> module system. Go"del supports infinite precision integers, infinite precision 
> rationals, and also floating-point numbers. It can solve constraints over finite 
> domains of integers and also linear rational constraints. It supports processing 
> of finite sets. It also has a flexible computation rule and a pruning operator 
> which generalises the commit of the concurrent logic programming languages. 
> Considerable emphasis is placed on Go"del's meta- logical facilities which provide 
> significant support for meta-programs that do analysis, transformation, 
> compilation, verification, debugging, and so on.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

>Hi I have read in one tutorial (I can't find it again, but it was probably
>either one on ibm, gentle introduction or yaht), that it is possible to
>define relationships between free variables and the same program can be used
>to calculate either first variable when second is set or second when first
>is set. I have understood this as if I set first free variable, run program
>and write name of second variable and I get result, and vice versa. I don't
>know if I understood it well. It looks really interesting but I can't figure
>out how to do it. Is this really possible? (I doubt.) If yes show example
>please. 
>
>Thanks
>Fero