[Pl-seminar] 10/9: Claire Alvis, "Increasing the Expressive Power of Constraints in a Functional World"

[Vincent St-Amour]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Claire Alvis
NUPRL

11:45 - 1:30
Wednesday, 10/9
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Increasing the Expressive Power of Constraints in a Functional World

Constraint programming languages provide powerful and efficient
mechanisms for solving problems. Existing systems rely on a direct
correspondence between constraints in the application domain and
the linguistic constraints in the language. This assumption is a
severe development burden.

In this talk, I present cKanren, a functional constraint programming
language embedded in Racket. It empowers programmers to create new
forms of constraints and constraint-propagators. This new expressive
power eliminates the need to translate domain constraints into those
available inside the language.  I will discuss cKanren's syntax, (informal)
semantics, and pragmatics, including how it is possible to write new
constraints and propagators without the need for translation.