COMBINING OBJECT-ORIENTED AND LOGIC PARADIGMS - A MODAL LOGIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

In this paper, a number of existing solutions and suggestions towards combining the object-oriented (OO) and logic programming paradigms have been briefly studied and categorized, and a sketch of a new solution has been proposed which tries to capture the essence of OO in terms of modal logic, and which could be implemented as a modal logic programming system. The proposal is based on the belief that two orthogonal dimensions - object hierarchy and time - are involved in OO that in many respects are similar. For the one-dimensional (static) case, three logics - MU, MU', and MU'' - have been designed, each allowing a different variety of inheritance modes. The two-dimensional (dynamic) case has been treated in a logic 2MU and its corresponding variants. Under certain OO-motivated definitions of Horn clause, the resolution calculi of these logics turn out to be complete.