[Om-announce] [logic-programming] Picat version 1.0 has been released

[picat at picat-lang.org]

We are pleased to announce the release of Picat version 1.0.
Picat (picat-lang.org) is a new programming language thatintegrates
logic programming, functional programming,dynamic programming with
tabling, constraint programming,and scripting. Picat incorporates many
language features forbetter productivity of software development,
includingpattern-matching rules, explicit non-determinism,
explicitunification, functions, constraints, and tabling. It is
notrare to find problems for which Picat requires an order ofmagnitude
fewer lines of code than many other languages.
Since the first release in Februrary 2014, Picat has beengrowing
steadily, and many users have had very positiveexperiences with the
language: Hakan Kjellerstrand's Picatpage (www.hakank.org/picat) has
about 775 programswritten by Hakan; the page
picat-lang.org/projects.html hasa collection of over one hundred
programs for a variety ofprojects and competitions; as part of the VK
Cup, the sitecodeforces.com featured Picat in a surprise round of
acompetition, and more than 500 teams competed.
Picat's tabled planner has been shown to be an efficienttool for
modeling and solving planning problems. RomanBartak, Agostino Dovier,
and Neng-Fa Zhou have hand-codedseveral models in Picat for the IPC
competition problems(picat-lang.org/ipc14). These declarative models
exploitPicat's features by using structural state representationsand
common-sense domain knowledge. These Picat modelssignificantly
outperform PDDL encodings run by the best PDDLplanners. Sergii
Dymchenko has also demonstrated the promiseof Picat's planner through
several AI planning problems,including problems from the Google Code
Jam competition(sdymchenko.com/blog/2015/01/31/ai-planning-picat).
One of the major additions made since version 0.1 is anoptimizing SAT
compiler, which translates high-levelconstraints into efficient CNF
codes to be solved by a SATsolver. The SAT compiler is offered as a
separate module,which has the same interface as the CP module. The
SATmodule is complementary to the CP module, and, for manyproblems,
significantly outperforms the CP module. The SATcompiler has been
tested by using hundreds of benchmarks andtens of thousands of
instances that have been used in CSPand Minizinc competitions.
Another major addition in version 1.0 is an externallanguage interface
with C, through which Picat programs cancall deterministic predicates
that are written as functionsin C. This interface can be used to link
Picat with othersystems, such as database, GUI programming,
mobilecomputing, game programming, networking, and web
programminglibraries.
Since the release of version 0.1 about one year ago,hundreds of
improvements have been incorporated into thedesign and the
implementation. The updates log can be seenat:
picat-lang.org/updates.html. Picat will continue togrow, and we look
forward to your input and feedback. Sendyour questions, comments, and
requests to:
 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/picat-lang
Sincerely,The Picat team   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openmath.org/pipermail/om-announce/attachments/20150403/a8574e89/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
logic-programming mailing list
logic-programming at lists.picat-lang.org
http://lists.picat-lang.org/mailman/listinfo/logic-programming