A list processing language TAO with multiple programming paradigms

This paper describes an interpreter-centered list processing language TAO which supports the logic programming paradigm and the object-oriented programming paradigm together with the conventional procedural programming paradigm in the framework of the Lisp language. TAO allows the user to mix these programming paradigms in solving complicated and multifaceted AI problems. The fundamentals of these programing paradigms, namely, unification, message passing and function call can nest each other in an expression. Thus, the user can use the result of a function call or a message passing in a unification straightforwardly and vice versa. TAO also supports the concurrent programming. The implementation of the TAO interpreter on a Lisp machine called ELIS achieves a remarkable efficiency.