Purely functional lazy non-deterministic programming

  • Authors:
  • Sebastian Fischer;Oleg Kiselyov;Chung-chieh Shan

  • Affiliations:
  • Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany;FNMOC, Monterey, CA, USA;Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Functional logic programming and probabilistic programming have demonstrated the broad benefits of combining laziness (non-strict evaluation with sharing of the results) with non-determinism. Yet these benefits are seldom enjoyed in functional programming, because the existing features for non-strictness, sharing, and non-determinism in functional languages are tricky to combine. We present a practical way to write purely functional lazy non-deterministic programs that are efficient and perspicuous. We achieve this goal by embedding the programs into existing languages (such as Haskell, SML, and OCaml) with high-quality implementations, by making choices lazily and representing data with non-deterministic components, by working with custom monadic data types and search strategies, and by providing equational laws for the programmer to reason about their code.