From: garry@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Garry Wiegand) Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: constraint satisfaction programming Message-ID: <3859@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 25 Feb 88 18:48:37 GMT Article-I.D.: batcompu.3859 Posted: Thu Feb 25 13:48:37 1988 Reply-To: garry@oak.cadif.cornell.edu Organization: Cornell Engineering && Ithaca Software, Inc. Lines: 159 Xref: yunexus comp.ai:1403 comp.lang.misc:1098 A week ago I asked about "constraint-based languages", and since then a number of people have replied. My thanks to you all - your notes have been a considerable help, and have led me to a lot of good work. A summary follows... ****************************************************************************** ** From: rich@devvax.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Richard Pettit) ** Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. See the next to last (January edition I think) of AI Expert. They have at least one article on constraint languages in it. No doubt there will be many more to follow. Rich [There's another popular article too - in Byte, last September or so. GW] ****************************************************************************** ** From: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu Take a look at ICCP'87. Prof. Baldwin and I have a paper there (p. 389) on a parallel constraint-based language. There is a more extensive TR (number 208, "The Design of the Consul Programming Language") you might like to order by sending a message to Ms. Peggy Meeker (meeker@cs.rochester.edu). For more details, the person to contact is certainly Prof. Doug Baldwin (baldwin@cs.rochester.edu), who is conducting research on general-purpose constraint languages. Good luck with your research! Cesar -------- Cesar Augusto Quiroz Gonzalez Department of Computer Science ...allegra!rochester!quiroz University of Rochester or Rochester, NY 14627 quiroz@cs.rochester.edu ****************************************************************************** ** From: jane@CCA.CCA.COM (Jane Eisenstein) ** Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge, MA Last fall, I ran into a nice book entitled "Constraint Programming Languages, Their Specification and Generation" by Wm Leler which is published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. It "provides an introduction to the subject of constraint satisfaction, a survey of existing systems, and introduces a new technique that makes constraint-satisfaction systems significantly easier to create and expand" in a very readable fashion. The latter half of the book focuses on the author's general-purpose specification language called Bertrand that allows a user to describe a constraint-satisfaction system using rules. The software described is available for a "nominal charge" from the author. ****************************************************************************** ** From: bnfb@june.cs.washington.edu (Bjorn Freeman-Benson) ** Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle A few of our Constraint Language References [Borning & Duisberg 86] Alan Borning and Robert Duisberg. Constraint-Based Tools for Building User Interfaces. _ACM_ _Transactions_on_Graphics_, 5(4), October 1986. ThingLab basics, object definer and Animus with an emphasis on MVCish things. [Borning et al. 87] Alan Borning, Robert Duisberg, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Axel Kramer, and Micheal Woolf. Constraint H ierarchies. In _OOPSLA'87_Conference_Proceedings_, pages 48-60, ACM SIGPLAN, October 1987. [Borning 81] Alan Borning. The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab, A Constraint-Oriented Simulation Laboratory . _TOPLAS_, 3(4):353-387, Oct 1981. The OOPSLA'87 one has a good bibliography... Bjorn N. Freeman-Benson [The work of Prof. Borning's group on a general UIMS is wonderful - very much along the lines we've started thinking about. GW] ****************************************************************************** ** From: Lindsay Errington ** Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Constraint Logic Programming is currently getting alot of attention at logic programming conferences. You might try: Jaffar, Joxan and Lassez, Jean-Louis, "Constraint Logic Programming", Proc of the 14th ACM Conference on Principles of Programming Languages, Munich, January 1987. Jaffar, Joxan and Michaylov, Spiro, "Methodology and Implementation of a CLP System", Proc of the 4th International Conference on Logic Programming , Melbourne Australia, May 1987, pp 196-218, MIT Press. Heintze, N.C., Michaylov, S., and Stuckey, P.J., "CLP(R) and Some Electrical Engineering Problems", Proc of the 4th International Conference on Logic Programming, Melbourne Australia, May 1987, pp 675-703, MIT Press. (I suspect that a number of people will send you the same citations) Jaffar's work is very interesting since it provides a semantic framework (if that makes any sense) for a whole family of constraint based languages. The bibliographies will point you to other work into constraints and logic programming. I hope this helps. Lindsay ****************************************************************************** ** From: uw-beaver!ssc-vax!dickey%cornell.UUCP@tcgould.TN.CORNELL.EDU (Frederick J Dickey) ** Subject: Re: "Constraint-based" languages A book has been published recently called (I think) "cobstraint- based languages." The author is William Leler or Leder (sorry, I don't have it here at work with me so I can't give you a more accurate reference). ****************************************************************************** ** From: mcvax!cwi.nl!lambert@uunet.UU.NET (Lambert Meertens) ** Organization: CWI, Amsterdam Here is a reference to a book that I haven't had an opportunity to look into yet since it is still being processed as a new acquistion by our library: W. Leler (1988). Constraint programming languages -- their specification and generation. Addison-Wesley series in computer science. Reading (MA), [etc.]. I would be interested in hearing about further references you have or may receive, and in particular in relation to UIMS. --Lambert Meertens, CWI, Amsterdam; lambert@cwi.nl ****************************************************************************** I've also heard that at least some Prologs understand how to do arithmetic, and that there's a commercial product called TK!Solver which does interesting things. I haven't seen these myself yet. Constraint languages seem to be very much still in their infancy. Lots of room for some good work (hint hint!) - I hope we'll be able to contribute some too. Thanks again - garry wiegand (garry@oak.cadif.cornell.edu - ARPA) (garry@crnlthry - BITNET)