From Logic to Functional Logic Programs (2022 Paper)

Background:

While predicate logic (first-order logic) provides the logical foundation for logic programming (Prolog etc.) and databases, functional programming is based on the different formalism of the lambda calculus.

There are proposals to combine functional and logic programming paradigms into "functional logic programming" languages, but these involve mapping between the two rather than being purely based on predicate logic.

Abstract:

«Logic programming is a flexible programming paradigm due to the use of predicates without a fixed data flow.

To extend logic languages with the compact notation of functional programming, there are various proposals to map evaluable functions into predicates in order to stay in the logic programming framework.

Since amalgamated functional logic languages offer flexible as well as efficient evaluation strategies, we propose an opposite approach in this paper.

By mapping logic programs into functional logic programs with a transformation based on inferring functional dependencies, we develop a fully automatic transformation which keeps the flexibility of logic programming but can improve computations by reducing infinite search spaces to finite ones. «