An overview of transaction logic

This paper presents an overview of Transaction Logic—a new formalism recently introduced in Bonner and Kifer (1992, 1993) 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 nonlogical phenomena, including so-called procedural knowledge in AI, and the behavior of object-oriented databases, especially methods with side effects.