An overview of Ciao and its design philosophy

Understand

We provide an overall description of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system emphasizing some of the novel aspects and motivations behind its design and implementation.

• An important aspect of Ciao is that, in addition to supporting logic programming (and, in particular, Prolog), it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles, and that the use of each of these features (including those of Prolog) can be turned on and off at will for each program module.
• Thus, a given module may be using, e.g., higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using assignment, predicates, Prolog meta-programming, and concurrency.
• Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way.