zelah

I will look closer at the SQL language then but what about efficiency?

Now suppose that the problem is not so straight forward as in finding the square root. Declarative programming in the general case would allow one to specify to a robot that it should walk to a certain location and arrive at a certain time. It knows (or can figure out) how to avoid crashing into things and also about not breaking laws and such. It can decide what time to leave the starting point but you don't have to tell it all the steps that will be involved. It is really about constraint satisfaction. Your program might look like this: "meetAt(workPlace , 5:00AM)". It is a well defined problem that clearly has right and wrong outcomes but the constraints are given, not a specific algorithm for the solution. Prolog is one example of a language that automatically solves declarative constraints but the syntax is bad.

This is amazing - thanks!

Now I can die perplexed :)

I would bring in efficient declarative programming. One could then tell the computer "I want the number which squared equals 2". The computer asks "To how many decimal places?". You specify any number you like. It would be truly amazing to be able to say to the computer what you want calculated without having to say how you want it calculated!

I vote twice for this one!

Linear Hybrid Cellular Automata: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7835/161f253ab117a3666fa8e7...

Parallelizable and efficient method for producing high quality pseudo random bits.

Designed to achieve maximal period (with 500 bit state the period of repetition is one less than 2^500).

Can be run backwards or forwards. Running it backwards undoes running it forwards and reproduces the pseudo random bits in reverse order.