A Design Space for Integrating Declarative Languages

Abstract

We present a survey of the Phoenix Design Space (PDS) and its applications. The PDS is a conceptual framework for studying declarative programming languages based on assertional programming as a uniform presentation of declarative language semantics, and a constraint abstract machine as a general computational model for declarative programming. The PDS provides a methodology for systematically integrating functional and logic programming languages. We present a simple classification of existing integrated functional and logic programming systems and show how the design space induces a powerful new programming paradigm, constraint functional logic programming, and provides insights into other aspects of declarative programming such as concurrency and program transformation.