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Showing posts from February, 2015

µKanren.NET - Featherweight Relational Logic Programming in C#

The µKanren paper is a nice introduction to a lightweight logic programming language which is a simplification of the miniKanren family of languages. The existing µKanren implementation in C# was a translation from Scheme, and thus is verbose, untyped with lots of casts, and non-idiomatic. I also found most of the other Kanren implementations unnecessarily obscure, heavily relying on native idioms that aren't clear to newcomers. uKanren.NET provides a clear presentation of the core principles of µKanren using only IEnumerable<T> and lambdas, showing that µKanren's search is fundamentally just a set of combinators for transforming sequences of states. The values of the sequence are sets of bound variables that satisfy a set of equations. For instance, given the following expression: Kanren.Exists(x => x == 5 | x == 6) You can read it off as saying there exists an integer value to which we can bind variable x, such that x equals either 5 or 6 [1]. Solving this eq