It's a nice write up but I'm not sure what the contribution is. I would have expected more engagement with Peter Van Roy's work, in particular his and Seif Haridi's epic book CTM [1] where the logic variable got properly unpacked more than 15 years previously. Or at least a citation.
Has anyone looked into how to decouple logic variables from backtracking? i.e., is there a good reason to unbind a variable apart from the Prolog discipline? (Without unbinding we get single-assignment variables where initialisation is decoupled from declaration, which I feel can often be simulated with laziness ala Haskell, but see CTM.)
Maybe I'm not understanding the insight here, but it sort of seams like having confluence defeats the purpose of logical semantics.
My specific concern is that by having logical semantics in a language you can represent non-deterministic ambiguous computations, but for this you need divergent paths which, if I understand correctly, the authors have removed from their language. So what's the point of doing this?
Has anyone looked into how to decouple logic variables from backtracking? i.e., is there a good reason to unbind a variable apart from the Prolog discipline? (Without unbinding we get single-assignment variables where initialisation is decoupled from declaration, which I feel can often be simulated with laziness ala Haskell, but see CTM.)
[1] https://webperso.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html
My specific concern is that by having logical semantics in a language you can represent non-deterministic ambiguous computations, but for this you need divergent paths which, if I understand correctly, the authors have removed from their language. So what's the point of doing this?