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Experience report: functional programming in c-rules

Published:01 October 2007Publication History
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Abstract

C-Rules is a business rules management system developed by Constraint Technologies International1 (CTI), designed for use in transportation problems. Users define rules describing various aspects of a problem, such as solution costs and legality, which are then queried from a host application, typically an optimising solver. At its core, C-Rules provides a functional expression language which affords users both power and flexibility when formulating rules. In this paper we will describe our experiences of using functional programming both at the end-user level, as well as at the implementation level. We highlight some of the benefits we, and the product's users, have enjoyed from the decision to base our rule system on features such as: higher-order functions, referential transparency, and static, polymorphic typing. We also outline some of our experiences in using Haskell to build an efficient compiler for the core language.

References

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 42, Issue 9
        Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference
        September 2007
        331 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/1291220
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
          October 2007
          346 pages
          ISBN:9781595938152
          DOI:10.1145/1291151

        Copyright © 2007 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 October 2007

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