Contraint Logic Programming - An Informal Introduction

Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is a new class of programming languages combining the declarativity of logic programming with the e ciency of constraint solving. New application areas, amongst them many di erent classes of combinatorial search problems such as scheduling, planning or resource allocation can now be solved, which were intractable for logic programming so far. The most important advantage that these languages o er is the short development time while exhibiting an e ciency comparable to imperative languages. This tutorial aims at presenting the principles and concepts underlying these languages and explaining them by examples. The objective of this paper is not to give a technical survey of the current state of art in research on CLP, but rather to give a tutorial introduction and to convey the basic philosophy that is behind the di erent ideas in CLP. It will discuss the currently most successful computation domains and provide an overview on the di erent consistency techniques used in CLP and its implementations. 1 2 1This work is partially funded by the ESPRIT project CHIC,Nr.5291. 2This report will appear in [FHK+92]. iii

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