PropLogic

In The propositional logic project, I describe my objections about the common state of this subject as follows:

Propositional logic sure has become a standard notion of our scientifically educated society, maybe as much as the arithmetic systems of integers, rational and real numbers. Boolean operations are standards in many areas of our computerized daily life, digital logic is the mathematical structure behind the computer hardware and information software.


But different to arithmetic systems and other basic data structures like lists, matrices or regular expressions, propositional algebras are not part of the standard tool repertoire of programming languages. This is certainly due to the cost explosion (see e.g. the boolean satisfiability problem) of its default implementation. What we need, is a fast implementation, which allows these structures to be used as basic tools for other programs.


The other problem with propositional logic is its classic algebraization as a (free) boolean algebra, which is only an abstraction of the semantic structure of propositional logic. That way, we loose some of the information. In other words, we need an algebraization that also preserves the syntactic structure of propositional worlds.

I am happy to announce the release of PropLogic, a Haskell package that intents to fix these problems and that might serve as a general and useful tool.


Despite my original intent to write a compact implementation for a pretty compact theory, this distribution is overloaded in an attempt to explain all its aspects. I suppose, the best place to start is A little program for propositional logic and a Brief introduction to PropLogic.


The first of these two tutorials doesn't require prior Haskell knowledge. Any fast implementation of a propositional algebra also provides a fast SAT solver and there is an interest and competition for the quickest solution. I have no idea how my program performs compare to other existing algorithms out there, but I tried to illustrate with some data how good it does the job. (I must admit however, that my "fast" program has its limits, too.)


The thing seems to work properly as it is, but I would still like to do some polishing and upload it to Hackage, soon. It would be very nice to get a boost from the comments and reactions of the Haskell community.