Accumulators: New Logic Variable Abstractions for Functional Languages

Abstract

Much attention has been focused by the declarative languages community on combining the functional and logic programming paradigms. In particular, there are many efforts to incorporate logic variables into functional languages. We propose a generalization of logic variables called accumulators which are eminently suited for incorporation into functional languages. We demonstrate the utility of accumulators by presenting examples which show that accumulators can be used profitably in many scientific applications to enhance storage efficiency and parallelism.