EMTPL: a programming language for temporal deductive data bases

The development of languages allowing a proper handling of time is important in many areas of computer science because the capability to deal with the notions of change and time are essential to solve their problems. We focus our work on the kind of languages that are useful in the area of databases, where some problems demand the possibility to represent and use temporal information. Our proposal provides a programming language, EMTPL, that could be used as a framework for a deductive database proposal. The underlying logic of this language is based on A. Prior´s (1967) deeply studied metric temporal logic. An algorithm is offered for a future implementation of an interpreter of EMTPL which is based on the notion of labelled computation tree (D. Gabbay, 1987). We compare our proposal with another approach of this kind, concluding that EMTPL has a better specification on the logical layer and the expressivity of our programming language is strictly greater