CATEGORIES, LOGIC PROGRAMMING, RELATIONS
Workshop announcement: Newton Institute
An informal 2-day workshop was held at the Newton Institute,
Cambridge, on Sept 18 (afternoon) and Sept 19, 1995.
The topics of discussion include categorical foundations of Logic
Programming, Categorical approaches to declarative programming and
program synthesis, and foundations of relational computing.
THE IDEOLOGY and all that...
Suggestions for a categorical approach to Logic Programming go back
at least to Burstall & Rydeheard's work proposing a categorical
approach to unification and Asperti, Martini, Corradini and Montanari's
Categorical analysis of logic programming and more recently Powers, Freyd,
Finkelstein et al.
Almost from their first appearance in the 1970's, Logic programming
languages have refused to stay within the putative boundaries of the
subject. Constraints, Control operators, expanded logics, types,
integration with functions, metaprogramming, are just a few of the
ways in which declarative programming has departed from simple
horn-clause backchaining. Thus it would be interesting to find a
sufficiently abstract--yet useful characterization of declarative
programming, or of executable specification, that could form a a basis
for analysis and development of such languages, and their compilers.
There are also some important semantic questions: what is a good framework
for analyzing, and comparing such languages? Is there a "uniform
semantics"? Also, there is a growing interest in alternative semantic
paradigms (beside Herbrand-base style, success-set semantics) such as
operational (Levi et al..) denotational approaches (Cousot, Misra)
some based on abstract interpretation (Cousot, Hermenegildo, Heintze etc...)
It seems that many of these questions can be addressed using
categories.
Some specific research aims, such as typing of LP, integrating
functional programming and LP, or partial evaluation in LP,
impose particularly severe semantic demands on the
developer, since pre-existing semantic frameworks (for types and
logic programming) must be integrated with declarative semantics.
Category theory has already played a significant role in the semantics
of typed and functional programming, and seems an essential tool in
any such proposed integrations.
SPEAKERS
- David Pym "Functorial Kripke models of the
lambda-Pi-calculus."
- James Harland " Some Remarks on Proof-theoretic
Notions of Operational Equivalence"
- John Power "A proposed semantics for logic
programs"
- John Lloyd "Integrating Functional and Logic
Programs"
- Jim Lipton "Categorical Logic Programming"
- Peter Freyd "The Internal Logic of Cartesian
Categories"
- Panel Discussion ( issues in Logic Programming semantics)
Back to Categories and Logic Programming Page
Last modified: Tue Jan 9 08:04:52 EST 1996