Bertrand / Wm Leler at pdxfunc meeting - Feb 9, 7pm

This month, Wm Leler will talk about Constraint Satisfaction Systems
and the Bertrand Programming Language. Wm is the creator of Bertrand
and the author of the book "Constraint Programming Languages: Their
Specification and Generation".

Constraint Satisfaction Systems were a hot topic of research in the
80's -- famous constraint systems include Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad,
Alan Borning's ThingLab (built on top of Smalltalk), Guy Steele's
constraint language, and James Gosling's Magritte. These systems were
used for computer graphics, design, and general numeric problem
solving, but most of these solvers were domain specific and thus of
limited usefulness.

Bertrand is an equational programming system whose purpose is to build
constraint satisfaction systems using simple equational rules.
Bertrand has an purely declarative semantics and an absurdly simple
syntax, yet it is a powerful and expressive language, capable of
solving problems in a large number of domains including graphics, word
problems, electrical circuits, or -- with the right rules -- virtually
any mostly-linear domain.

Since this is the Functional Programming Study Group, this talk will
cover the underlying equational programming language of Bertrand and
ways in which it could be extended to make it more powerful.

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