Integrating Efficient Records into Concurrent Constraint Programming

Autor: Peter Van Roy and Michael Mehl and Ralf Scheidhauer

Herausgeber:

We show how to implement efficient records in constraint logic programming (CLP) and its generalization concurrent constraint programming (CCP). Records can be naturally integrated into CCP as a new constraint domain. The implementation provides the added expressive power of concurrency and fine-grained constraints over records, yet does not pay for this expressivity when it is not used. In addition to traditional record operations, our implementation allows to compute with partially-known records. This fine granularity is useful for natural-language and knowledge-representation applications. The paper describes the implementation of records in the DFKI Oz system. Oz is a higher-order CCP language with encapsulated search. We show that the efficiency of records in CCP is competitive with modern Prolog implementation technology and that our implementation provides improved performance for natural-language applications.