[ENH] Constraint Framework

Pierre Roy pierre at limbo.create.ucsb.edu
Wed Jun 9 18:19:13 UTC 1999


Hi,

I have developed several constraint solvers (in VW and Java) and I was also puzzled by
the subject of the post. However, this is very interesting. One of the essential
differences between your stuff and constraints is that you only deal with unary
contraints, which is a trivial application for constraint because there is no
complexity. Using a full-fledged constraint framework would allow to lead complex
checkings, such as:
- Collection A has twice as many elements as collection B
- All the elements of collection A are different
- There is a given design pattern in a given library
And arbitrarily complex combinations thereof...
All these validations could be easilly (but not necessarily efficiently) performed
statically. Dynamical verification raises tricky issues, but would increase the
expression usefulness of such a framework dramatically.
Anyway I am porting my solver in Squeak, I don't know exactly when it is available,
hopufully soon.  It could be helpful for implementing a more complex version of your
framework.  The idea being that constraint resolution allows to deal with complexity
very efficiently.

- Pierre





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