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Logic programming

2016VT

Status Cancelled
School National Graduate School in Computer Science (CUGS)
Division TCSLAB
Owner Wlodzimierz Drabent
Homepage http://www.ida.liu.se/~wlodr/phd.lp/

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Course plan

No of lectures

30 h

Recommended for

PdD students in computer science

The course was last given

2011

Goals

Provide a solid introduction into logic programming.

Together with a companion course on functional programming, the courses present two programming paradigms, which differ from that of mainstream programming (i.e. procedural and object oriented).
The latter can be seen as still related to the architecture of computer hardware. Its main concept - a mutable variable - is an abstraction of a RAM memory cell. In such languages, roughly speaking, programs are descriptions of sequences of computational steps. The role of the steps is to modify the state.
In contrast, programs in (pure) logic or functional programming describe the tasks of the computations. There is no state and mutable data; this makes it easier to reason about complex programs.

Logic programming (LP) employs (a subset of) the language of the standard first order logic as a programming language. In principle, a program is a set of axioms describing a problem to be solved; the computed results are logical consequences of the program. In practice, programs also describe how the results are computed; this can be modified by the programmer without changing the logical meaning of the program.
Hence reasoning about the meaning of programs and their correctness (declarative semantics) can be separated from that about program execution (operational semantics). Efficient implementations of LP exist.

Prerequisites

Some mathematical maturity, for instance given by introductory courses on logic, discrete mathematics, and formal languages and automata theory.
Some experience of programming; familiarity with some programming languages.

Organization

Lectures.
Exercises and project work.

Contents

- Definite clause logic programs, their declarative and operational semantics.
- Prolog as an implementation of LP.
- Programming examples, LP as a declarative programming paradigm.
- Reasoning about logic programs (formal & practical).
- Constraint logic programming.
- Negation in LP, including Answer Set Programming.

Literature

Articles, handouts, book chapters.
U. Nilsson and J. Maluszynski. Logic, Programming and Prolog (2ed).

Lecturers

W. Drabent

Examiner

W. Drabent

Examination

Home assignments and a minor project together with its presentation.
Participation in the course

Credit

3p + 2p for the project

Comments


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