The Reasoned Schemer (MIT Press)

"The Little books are unique in the way they combine deep and subtle ideas with hands-on humorous presentation. "The Reasoned Schemer, " the latest book in the series, is no exception. Friedman, Byrd, and Kiselyov provide a unique presentation of many of the ideas behind logic programming, which is developed as a natural--though subtle--extension of functional programming. For perfecting your programming skills and style you cannot do better than sit at the feet of Friedman and Kiselyov."--Ehud Lamm, Founder of 'Lambda the Ultimate, ' the programming languages weblog "Some programmers are particularly fascinated by new ways of thinking about programming and computation. But few programmers have much experience with logic programming, and fewer still understand its essence. There has never been a more engaging presentation of this material, or a clearer view all the way to the bottom. Like the other Little books, this book is sure to broaden your horizons. And in fact, this one has the broadest horizons yet."--Matt Hellige, Researcher, Accenture Technology Labs "Contrary to popular belief, logic programming doesn't always mean programming in Prolog. In this groundbreaking book, Friedman and Kiselyov extend Scheme to form a completely new kind of logic programming system, one which is in many ways even more elegant than Prolog. Written in the same classic question-and-answer format as the authors' previous book "The Little Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer" covers goals, first-class relations, interleaved and non-interleaved backtracking, the relationship between relational and functional programming, and much more. Reading this book will not only cause your geek rating to skyrocket and impress all the Cool Kids, it will also open your eyes to a paradigm of programming which most programmers are completely unaware of, but which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the programming systems of the future. More importantly, though, this book is great fun to read and will make you a better programmer."--Michael Vanier, Caltech

A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming. The goal of this book is to show the beauty and elegance of relational programming, which captures the essence of logic programming. The book shows how to implement a relational programming language in Scheme, or in any other functional language, and demonstrates the remarkable flexibility of the resulting relational programs. As in the first edition, the pedagogical method is a series of questions and answers, which proceed with the characteristic humor that marked The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. Familiarity with a functional language or with the first five chapters of The Little Schemer is assumed. For this second edition, the authors have greatly simplified the programming language used in the book, as well as the implementation of the language. In addition to revising the text extensively, and simplifying and revising the "Laws" and "Commandments," they have added explicit "Translation" rules to ease translation of Scheme functions into relations.