Abstract
Feature Constraint Systems have been proposed as a logical data structure for constraint (logic) programming. They provide a record-like view to trees by identifying subtrees by keyword rather than by position. Their atomic constraints are finer grained than in the constructor-based approach. The recently proposed CFT [15] in fact generalizes the rational tree system of Prolog II.
We propose a new feature constraint system EF which extends CFT by considering features as first class values. As a consequence, EF contains constraints like x[υ]ω where υ is a variable ranging over features, while CFT restricts υ to be a fixed feature symbol.
We show that the satisfiability of conjunctions of atomic EF-constraints is NP-complete. Satisfiability of quantifier-free EF-constraints is shown to be decidable, while the ∃*∀*∃* fragment of the first order theory is undecidable.
Supported by the Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie (contract ITW 9105), the Esprit Basic Research Project ACCLAIM (contract EP 7195) and the Esprit Working Group CCL (contract EP 6028).
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Treinen, R. (1993). Feature constraints with first-class features. In: Borzyszkowski, A.M., Sokołowski, S. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 1993. MFCS 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 711. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57182-5_64
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57182-5_64
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