A modular semantics for higher-order declarative programming with constraints

  • Authors:
  • Rafael del Vado Vírseda;Fernando Pérez Morente

  • Affiliations:
  • Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practices of declarative programming
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Modularity is a key issue in the construction of large multi-paradigm declarative programs involving complex features like higher-order, polymorphism or constraints. The modular framework defined in this paper for higher-order declarative constraint programming builds complex software systems by combining and composing existing components or modules from a number of composition operations expressive enough to model typical modularization issues like export/import relationships and inheritance. The effectiveness of our approach relies on a higher-order constraint rewriting logic over a parametrically given constraint domain as the basis of a model-theoretic and fixpoint semantics for program modules, and a modular semantics given by a suitable immediate consequence operator which is compositional and fully abstract, offering the possibility of reasoning on the composition process itself. The availability of this well-founded semantics characterization for structuring and modularizing higher-order declarative constraint programs provides the ground to perform sound semantics-based transformation, analysis, debugging and verification of declarative software.