Oleg Kiselyov

A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming. The goal of this book is to show the beauty and elegance of relational programming, which captures the essence of logic programming. The book shows how to implement a relational programming language in Scheme, or in any other functional language, and demonstrates the remarkable flexibility of the resulting relational programs. As in the first edition, the pedagogical method is a series of questions and answers, which proceed with the characteristic humor that marked The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. Familiarity with a functional language or with the first five chapters of The Little Schemer is assumed. For this second edition, the authors have greatly simplified the programming language used in the book, as well as the implementation of the language. In addition to revising the text extensively, and simplifying and revising the "Laws" and "Commandments," they have added explicit "Translation" rules to ease translation of Scheme functions into relations.

Reconciling Abstraction with High Performance teaches the reader how to write typed code generators, how to make them modular, and how to gradually introduce domain-specific optimizations with MetaOCaml. Assuming no prior knowledge of MetaOCaml and only a basic familiarity with functional programming, it explains and illustrates how to implement a simple domain-specific language (DSL) for linear algebra, with layers of optimizations for sparsity and memory layout of matrices and vectors, and their algebraic properties. This book is based on the written record of a live tutorial delivered on several occasions (first at CUFP – Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2013). It inherits the hands-on style of those tutorials, built around live coding, in interaction with the MetaOCaml and its type checker and the audience. It develops code piece-by-piece by submitting small fragments to the MetaOCaml interpreter, fixing type problems, generating sample code and testing it, noting the points of improvement, and adjusting the generator as needed. The monograph includes many exercises and homework projects to work on alone or in groups.