Picat – logic-based multi-paradigm programming language

Picat is a simple, and yet powerful, logic-based multi-paradigm programming language aimed for general-purpose applications.

Picat is a rule-based language, in which predicates, functions, and actors are defined with pattern-matching rules. Picat incorporates many declarative language features for better productivity of software development, including explicit non-determinism, explicit unification, functions, list comprehensions, constraints, and tabling. Picat also provides imperative language constructs, such as assignments and loops, for programming everyday things. The Picat implementation, which is based on a well-designed virtual machine and incorporates a memory manager that garbage-collects and expands the stacks and data areas when needed, is efficient and scalable. Picat can be used for not only symbolic computations, which is a traditional application domain of declarative languages, but also for scripting and modeling tasks.

Compared with functional and scripting languages, the support of explicit unification, explicit non-determinism, tabling, and constraints makes Picat more suitable for symbolic computations. Compared with Prolog, Picat is arguably more expressive and scalable: it is not rare to find problems for which Picat requires an order of magnitude fewer lines of code to describe than Prolog and Picat can be significantly faster than Prolog because pattern-matching facilitates indexing of rules.

Picat provides functional programming features, such as pattern-matching, recursion, and list comprehension, for composing functions.

This is free and open source software.

Website: picat-lang.org
Support:
Developer: Picat
License: Mozilla Public License 2.0

Picat is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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