Download or read book A Tight, Practical Integration of Relations and Functions written by Harold Boley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-09-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in other fields, in computer science certain objects of study can be synthesized from different basic elements, in different ways, and with different resulting stabilities. In subfields such as artificial intelligence, computational logic, and programming languages various relational and functional ingredients and techniques have been tried for the synthesis of declarative programs. This text considers the notions of relations, as found in logic programming or in relational databases, and of functions, as found in functional programming or in equational languages. We study a declarative integration which is tight, because it takes place right at the level of these notions, and which is still practical, because it preserves the advantages of the widely used relational and functional languages PROLOG and LISP. The resulting relational and functional language, RELFUN, is used here for exemplifying all integration principles.