An Overview of Transaction Logic

This paper presents an overview of Transaction Logic|a new formalism recently introduced in 11, 12] and designed to deal with the phenomenon of state changes in logic programming, databases, and AI. Transaction Logic has a natural model theory and a sound and complete proof theory. Unlike many other logics, however, it is suitable for programming procedures that accomplish state transitions in a logically sound manner. Transaction logic amalgamates such features as hypothetical and committed updates, dynamic constraints on transaction execution, nondeterminism, and bulk updates. Transaction Logic also appears to be suitable as a logical model of hitherto non-logical phenomena, including so-called procedural knowledge in AI, and the behavior of object-oriented databases, especially methods with side eeects.