Teaching functional and logic programming with a single computation model

Abstract. Functional and logic programming are often taught in different courses so that students often do not understand the relationships between these declarative programming paradigms. This is mainly due to the dif-ferent underlying computation models—deterministic reduction and lazy evaluation in functional languages, and non-deterministic search in logic languages. We show in this paper that this need not be the case. Taking into account recent developments in the integration of functional and logic programming, it is possible to teach the ideas of modern functional lan-guages like Haskell and logic programming on the basis of a single compu-tation model. From this point of view, logic programming is considered as an extension of functional programming where ground expressions are ex-tended to contain also free variables. We describe this computation model, the structure of a course based on it, and draw some conclusions from the experiences with such a course