[Newbies] AMB

[Sean P. DeNigris]

Is anyone familiar with the AMB project, installable from SqMap catalog? 

I got excited by the description's assertion that "it can do incredible
things" (it even provided an example. After reading the description, tests,
code, and references, I have an inkling what it does, but don't quite
understand what is "incredible" about it and don't want to miss the magic!!

The catalog description is: 

This is the "ambigous", "nondeterminist", "angelic" operator aka amb

... more seriously described as a declarative control flow statement able to
enumerate over finite domains all values that make a program terminate. It
uses continuations to walk the tree of possible tuples, backtracking when
the program fails. 

The amazing thing is the simplicity of the code: four short or very short
methods on the instance side, the class side methods only providing
syntactic sugar.

And it can do incredible things such as:

AMB assert: [:string :n :char | (string occurrencesOf: char) = n]
	over: #('maman' 'barbapapa' 'guiliguili' 'arthur' 'chtulu')
	and: #(2 4 1)
	and: #($m $b $a $i $u)

See AMBTest for more magic.

I would have been unable to implement this by myself ! This is a port of the
code by Dorai Sitaram which is the reference documentation for amb:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme-Z-H-16.html#node_chap_14



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Cheers,
Sean
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