Abstract

Nondeterministic Lisp is a simple extension of Lisp which provides automatic backtracking. Nondeterminism allows concise description of many search tasks which form the basis of much AI research. This paper discusses Screamer, an efficient implementation of nondeterministic Lisp as a fully portable extension of Common Lisp. In this paper we present the basic nondeterministic Lisp constructs, motivate the utility of the language via numerous short examples, and discuss the compilation techniques. Supported in part by an AT&T Bell Laboratories Ph.D. scholarship to the author, by a Presidential Young Investigator Award to Professor Robert C. Berwick under National Science Foundation Grant DCR-- 85552543, by a grant from the Siemens Corporation, and by the Kapor Family Foundation. Also supported in part by ARO grant DAAL 03--89--C--0031, by DARPA grant N00014--90--J--1863, by NSF grant IRI 90-- 16592, and by Ben Franklin grant 91S.3078C--1 y Supported in part by the Advanced Resea...

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