A Computer Aided Constraint Programming System
Edward P. K. Tsang · 2001
This paper describes a computer-aided constraint programming system. Traditional Constraint Programming Languages have been built on top of host languages such as Prolog, Lisp, C++. This means that the user must have reasonable knowledge of the syntax and semantics of the host language before being able to use the constraint technology effectively. On top of this, the user may also be required to specify the heuristics and, or algorithm to solve the constraint problem. This leads to a bottleneck in the amount of people who have the necessary expertise in both constraint programming and the host language to implement practical systems, which use constraint satisfaction techniques. Our aim is to abstract out as many of these details as possible, to produce a high level system, where the problem specification is the focus. We have defined a simple, intuitive, high level, declarative (the order in which constraints are specified has no significance) language called EaCL for specifying cons...