Programming with singular and plural non-deterministic functions
Adrián Riesco, Juan Rodríguez-Hortalá · 2010
Non-strict non-deterministic functions are one of the most distinctive features of functional-logic languages. Traditionally, two semantic alternatives have been considered for this kind of functions: call-time choice and run-time choice. While the former is the standard choice of modern implementations of FLP, the latter lacks some basic properties--mainly compositionality--that have prevented its use in practical FLP implementations. Recently, a new compositional plural semantics for FLP has been proposed. Although this semantics allows an elegant encoding of some problems--in particular those with an implicit manipulation of sets of values--, call-time choice still remains the best option for many common programming patterns.