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Data structures considered harmful
Conference presentation

Data structures considered harmful

John Cleary and Mark Utting
Australasian Workshop on Computational Logic (AWCL) (Canberra, Australia, 03-Feb-2000–04-Feb-2000)
Australian National University
2000

Abstract

Computation Theory and Mathematics
We describe an approach to logic programming where the execution of a pure logic program is ordered on "temporal" values in the program. The resulting programs are relational and avoid a premature commitment to data structures. This is a strong advantage in a programming language. We present the programming language Starlog as an example of this approach and give a summary of its denotational and operational semantics. Despite being a pure logic language with a monotonic semantics the language is still able to directly mutate data, including assignment of values to variables. Using sophisticated implementation techniques, including bottom-up execution, constraints and the compilation of relations to data structures, we claim that the approach can be executed efficiently.

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