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Comment by swannodette | Hacker News Reader

miniKanren is also a "full-blown" logic system. Kanren is mostly about optimizations. From what I've seen these can be applied to miniKanren implementations.

That's cool that you found minilop! It looks like that was an early attempt to whittle down Kanren to its essence which became the miniKanren used in The Reasoned Schemer.

2) is a version of miniKanren not much different from the one used in Byrd's dissertation.

cKanren is not really a "different" version of miniKanren. It retains most of the miniKanren core and adds constraint logic programming. From what I can tell, you can consider this the new miniKanren.

Great research by the way, it's awesome to see this kind of thing on HN.

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Many thanks for the info. I'll have to delve into cKanren more - I kind of glossed over it.

For anyone else interested, it looks like Claire Alvis is leading development of cKanren. Here's a background paper and a link to the source on github:

http://scheme2011.ucombinator.org/papers/Alvis2011.pdf

https://github.com/calvis/cKanren

And here's a short example and discussion of use of cKanren by (I think) one of the core.logic creators:

http://dosync.posterous.com/another-taste-of-ckanren

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

Also, the Friedman group maintains some other source here:

https://github.com/iucs/relational-research

which includes...wait for it...babyMiniKanren (babymk)!

The dosync.posterous.com link is me ;)

Heh...excellent, David! Thanks for the great work - I've read several pieces you've done on Kanren stuff (and read some of your past logic programming comments here), and I've learned a lot.

EDIT: You supplemented Clojure's implementation of miniKanren (core.logic) with great macros like defrel, facts, extend-rel, and a lot of other stuff. Those are the kinds of things that seemed a bit more convenient to me in Kanren (the optimized Scheme version), maybe because they seem more "Prolog-like" to me, especially extend-rel. I need to go back and look at RS miniKanren again to see how easy/desirable it would be to have those macros. Any thoughts?

I showed my extensions to Dan & Will and they both liked them. I think miniKanren could benefit from clear, simple implementations of something like defrel, fact, etc.

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