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Introduction to the CIAO System

• Many proposed languages and systems (CLP(*), Prolog-IV, PNU-Prolog, Eclipse, Mercury, Gödel, -Prolog, Lygon, Babel, AKL, Oz,...; &-Prolog, Aurora, Muse, DDAS, Andorra-I, IDIOM, EAM, ...).
• They raise many questions for a future system. Examples:
  • From the language point of view:
    • higher-order/functions? native or as an add-on?
    • constraints? which systems? native or as an add-on?
    • low-level annotations for performance?
    • explicit or implicit concurrency?
    • concurrency by default?
    • sequential operator?
    • explicit or implicit search?
    • explicit or implicit distribution?
    • ...
  • From the compiler/abstract machine point of view:
    • which optimizations?
    • global analysis?
    • environment stacking or goal stacking?
    • which type of parallelism?
    • ``multi sequential'' model?
    • goal-based (delay) or continuation-based (cc) suspension?
    • interactions with non-determinism: encapsulation; copying/vs. sharing/vs. recomputation,
    • memory management/scheduling (+ also interactions w/non-determinism), ...