Abstract
Constraint Handling Rules (CHRs) are a high-level rule-based programming language commonly used to write constraint solvers. The theoretical operational semantics for CHRs is highly non-deterministic and relies on writing confluent programs to have a meaningful behaviour. Implementations of CHRs use an operational semantics which is considerably finer than the theoretical operational semantics, but is still non-deterministic (from the user’s perspective). This paper formally defines this refined operational semantics and proves it implements the theoretical operational semantics. It also shows how to create a (partial) confluence checker capable of detecting programs which are confluent under this semantics, but not under the theoretical operational semantics. This supports the use of new idioms in CHR programs.
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Duck, G.J., Stuckey, P.J., de la Banda, M.G., Holzbaur, C. (2004). The Refined Operational Semantics of Constraint Handling Rules. In: Demoen, B., Lifschitz, V. (eds) Logic Programming. ICLP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3132. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27775-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27775-0_7
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