Knowledge of uncertain worlds: programming with logical constraints

Abstract

Abstract Programming with logic for sophisticated applications must deal with recursion and negation, which together have created significant challenges in logic, leading to many different, conflicting semantics of rules. This paper describes a unified language, DA logic, for design and analysis logic, based on the unifying founded semantics and constraint semantics, that supports the power and ease of programming with different intended semantics. The key idea is to provide meta-constraints, support the use of uncertain information in the form of either undefined values or possible combinations of values and promote the use of knowledge units that can be instantiated by any new predicates, including predicates with additional arguments.