This is an ongoing research project to explore the implementability and utility of Equational Logic Programming. It has already produced a compiler for an equational programming lanquage in which a program is a set of equations, an input is a term, and a computation is a derivation of certain logical consequences of the equations in the program, leading to the output of a term in normal form equivalent to the input. Novel features of the language include a total refusal to compromise semantics for performance, leading to a uniform use of "lazy" evaluation - a technique in which precisely the information demonstrably relevant to the final output is automatically computed. The current version of the compiler uses partial evaluation of intermediate code as an optimization technique, and its performance is approaching that of conventional optimized compilers for C. Continuing research will include the study of more sophisticated evaluation techniques to improve performance, theoretical advances to extend the class of equational programs that can be compiled, simulation studies to determine the potential benefits of parallel implementations of equational programming languages, and experimentation with advance user interfaces, including structure editor interfaces.
