Communicating Clauses: Towards Synchronous Communication in Contextual Logic Programming

Communicating clauses are proposed as an extension to contextual logic programming aiming at specifying the synchronous communication between agents, described here as units. The expressiveness of the extended framework is argued through the coding of producer/consumer schemes and several applications combining the logic and object-oriented styles of programming. Operational and declarative semantics are designed for the new framework. The operational semantics rests on a derivation relation stating how agents can be evaluated under contextual and synchronization constraints. The declarative semantics extend the classical model and xed point theory to take these constraints into account. As suggested, an eeort has been made to keep these semantics in the main streams of logic programming semantics. However, the contextual and synchronization constraints raise new problems for which fresh solutions are proposed.

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