A visual logic programming language based on sets and partitioning constraints

Abstract

This paper presents a new programming language named SPARCL that has four major elements: it is a visual language, it is a logic programming language, it relies on sets to organize data, and it supports partitioning constraints on the contents of sets. It is a visual programming language in that the representation of the language depends extensively on non-textual graphics and the programming process relies on graphical manipulation of this representation. It is a logic programming language in that the underlying semantics of the language is the resolution of clauses of a Horn-like subset of first order predicate logic. It uses sets as the only method of combining terms to build complex terms. Finally, one may constrain a set's structure by specifying a partitioning into pairwise disjoint subsets. >