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That's a good example. I've always thought of ASP being more influenced by SAT solvers than Prolog, but following the links from the WP article, there's a lot
by chalst 15y ago
That's a good example. I've always thought of ASP being more influenced by SAT solvers than Prolog, but following the links from the WP article, there's a lot of Prolog culture there: Horn clauses, Herbrand interpretations, &c. So maybe LP is moving on. I should take a closer look. (I probably should have years ago: I've done a fair bit of refereeing for IJCAI over the years).
Multi-paradigm languages are not so great for the Kowalski-esque LP world, because the elements of these languages don't fit in the Kowalski/Pierce picture of knowledge representation and reasoning. Something like lambda-Prolog, which uses higher-order unification to model functional programming within a clausal language, seems to me to be a much better, more conservative step for this community.
- _delirium 15y agoI think ASP's a bit of a merger of the two cultures. The implementations are heavily SAT-influenced, with all existing ones based on eliminating variables to ground to a finite program that's then solved. But its semantics (stable-model semantics) originated in the early-90s flurry of attempts to come up with a solid logical semantics for LP (alongside other attempts like the well-founded semantics), to replace Prolog's operationally defined "whatever SLDNF resolution returns" semantics, and especially its displeasing-to-logicians property of the semantics depending on statement order. And the most widely used surface syntax, sometimes called "AnsProlog", is an adaptation of Prolog syntax. This research group in particular is now pushing it heavily in the programmability/expressivity direction, which is pretty interesting: http://potassco.sourceforge.net/ http://potassco.sourceforge.net/ . There is even some other research floating around on more software-engineeringish things like ASP debugging techniques.