The Alma Project, or How First-Order Logic Can Help Us in Imperative Programming

The aim of the Alma project is the design of a strongly typed constraint programming language that combines the advantages of logic and imperative programming. The first stage of the project was the design and implementation of Alma0, a small programming language that provides a support for declarative programming within the imperative programming framework. It is obtained by extending a subset of Modula-2 by a small number of features inspired by the logic programming paradigm. In this paper we discuss the rationale for the design of Alma-0, the benefits of the resulting hybrid programming framework, and the current work on adding constraint processing capabilities to the language. In particular, we discuss the role of the logical and customary variables, the interaction between the constraint store and the program, and the need for lists.