Cofola: A Declarative Language for Combinatorial Counting Problems

There's a new paper on arXiv that introduces Cofola, which stands for COmbinatorial counting LAnguage with First-Order logic. This typed declarative language is designed to tackle issues related to combinatorial counting. These problems, often found in areas like artificial intelligence, statistics, and discrete math, involve counting subsets, multisets, permutations, partitions, or compositions under various conditions. Current methods can be either tedious and unreliable or slow in computation. Cofola offers features such as sets, bags, tuples, sequences, circles, partitions, and compositions, along with relational and arithmetic constraints. It clearly links each Cofola program to a specific combinatorial counting issue through its denotational semantics.