We propose a method to extend an ML-style polymorphic language with transparent communication primitives, and give their precise operational semantics. These primitives allow any polymorphic programs de nable in ML to be used remotely in a manner completely transparent to the programmer. Furthermore, communicating programs may be based on di erent architecture and use di erent data representations. We de ne a polymorphic functional calculus with transparent communication primitives, which we call dML, as an extension of Damas and Milner's proof system for ML. We then develop an algorithm to translate dML to a \core " language containing only low-level communication primitives that are readily implementable in most of distributed environments. To establish the type safety of communicating programs, we de ne an operational semantics of the core language and prove that the polymorphic type system of dML is sound with respect to the operational semantics of the translated terms of the core language.

Functional and logic programming are the most important declarative programming paradigms, and interest in combining them has grown over the last decade. Early research concentrated on the definition and improvement of execution principles for such integrated languages, while more recently efficient implementations of these execution principles have been developed so that these languages became relevant for practical applications. In this paper we survey the development of the operational semantics as well as

In this paper we study the relationships between logic programming and functional programming, trying to answer the following basic question: to what extent is logic programming just functional programming in disguise? We develop a theory to formally express this correspondence, and exhibit a class that can by right be considered as the functional core of logic programming. Moreover, since the functional meaning of each program in this class is provided constructively, via a transformation from logic to functional programs, we show how the obtained theoretical results are useful also in the study of languages integration, termination issues, and practical implementations. 1 Introduction During the recent years, a huge amount of effort was devoted to integrating the two paradigms of functional programming and logic programming, and to develop languages combining them (see for instance [12]). However, much less attention was devoted to the basic problem of studying what are the intimat...