RULE2001

Second International Workshop on Rule-Based Programming

Affiliated with PLI 2001

September 4, 2001, Firenze, Italy


The Third International Workshop on Rule-Based Programming (RULE'02) will be in Pittsburgh, USA.
Call for Papers (.ps .pdf)

Program of RULE'2001

10:30-12:30 Session 1

(Chair: Claude Kirchner)
Kiyoshi Akama, Ekawit Nantajeewarawat, and Hidekatsu Koike
A Class of Rewriting Rules and Reverse Transformation for Rule-based Equivalent Transformation

Bernd Fischer and Grigore Rosu
Interpreting Abstract Interpretation in Membership Equational Logic

Jean-Louis Giavetto and Olivier Michel
MGS: a Rule-Based Programming Language for Complex Objects and Collections

Berthold Hoffmann and Mark Minas
Transformation of Shaped Nested Graphs and Diagrams

14:00-15:30 Session 2

(Chair: Rakesh Verma)
Salvador Lucas
On proving termination of OBJ programs with positive local strategies

Quang-Huy Nguyen
Certifying Term Rewriting Proofs in ELAN

Georg Struth
Knuth-Bendix Complesion for Non-Symmetric Transitive Relations

16:00-18:00 Session 3

(Chair: Mark van den Brand)
Olivier Danvy and Lasse R. Nielsen
Syntactic Theories in practice

Eelco Visser
Scoped Dynamic Rewrite Rules

E. Lamma, L. Maestrami, P. Mello, F. Riguzzi, and S. Storari
Rule-based Programming for Building Expert Systems: a Comparison in the Microbiological Data Validation and Surveillance Domain

Jean-Yves Moyen
System Presentation: An Analyser of rewriting systems complexity

Motivations
Rule-based programming began with AI rule-based systems in the seventies. This paradigm is inherent in Prolog and has been used in program-manipulation systems like Refine. Indeed, the rewriting concept appears throughout CS, from its theoretical foundations to very practical implementations. Extreme examples include the mail system in Unix which uses rules in order to rewrite mail addresses to canonical forms and the transition rules describing the behaviour of tree automata. Rewriting is used in semantics in order to describe the meaning of programming languages, as well as in program transformations like the re-engineering of Cobol programs. It is used to compute, implicitly or explicitly, as in Mathematica or OBJ, but also to perform deduction when using inference rules to describe a logic, theorem prover or constraint solver. Last, but not least, this approach is central to systems that raise the notion of rule to an explicit first class object, like expert systems, programming languages based on equational logic, algebraic specifications (e.g. OBJ), functional programming (e.g. ML) and transition systems (e.g. Murphi).

Rule-based programming is currently experiencing a renewed period of growth with the emergence of new concepts and systems that allow one to better understand and better use it. From the theoretical side, after the in-depth study of rewriting concepts during the eighties, the nineties saw the emergence of the general concepts of rewriting logic and of the rewriting calculus. On the practical side, new languages, like ASM, ASF+SDF, Claire, ELAN and Maude, systems like LRR, and also commercial products, like Ilog Rules, have shown that the concept of rule could be of major interest as a programming tool. In particular, because it is now of practical use, fundamental questions arise, like the theoretical study of the algorithmic complexity of programs written in such languages, as well as their optimisation. Of course, semantics of such languages, compilation techniques and methodological studies of their use should also be explored.

Rule based programming is closely related to both functional programming (when the term rewrite system is confluent and terminating) as well as classical logic programming (when the rewrite system is used for nondeterministic search).

Accordingly, the purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from these various domains to foster fertilisation between theory and practice, as well as to favour the growth of this programming paradigm.



Program Committee
Mark van den Brand (CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), co-chair
Iliano Cervesato (ITT Industries, Alexandria, USA)
Nachum Dershowitz (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)
Bernd Fischer (RIACS/NASA Ames, Moffett Field, USA)
Claude Kirchner (Loria & INRIA, Nancy, France)
Jean-Yves Marion (Loria & INRIA, Nancy, France)
Narciso Marti-Oliet (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Rakesh M. Verma (University of Houston, Houston, USA), co-chair
Eelco Visser (Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Address of the program co-chairs:
RVerma@UH.EDU http://www.cs.uh.edu/~rmverma
Mark.van.den.Brand@cwi.nl http://www.cwi.nl/~markvdb