Term-Rewriting Implementation of Equational Logic Programming

In 1975 I started a small project to explore the consequences of implementing equational programs with no semantic compromises. Latest results include a compiler that executes exactly the logical consequences of an equational program, with run-time speed comparable to compiled Franz LISP. This paper describes the accomplishments of the project very briefly, concentrating on shortcomings and directions for future work. 1 Introduction The most common approach to providing semantics for programming languages is to regard a program as the definition of a collection of functions. In some cases great ingenuity is required to construct the unique function associated with each symbol in a program. Inputs and outputs are regarded as values in the domains of the defined functions, and the input/output behavior of the implementation of a program is expected to be exactly the function associated with some designated symbol in the program. I prefer, This work was supported by NSF grant DCR-8601..