Claire is a general-purpose programming language, best suited to application software requiring sophisticated data modeling, rule processing or problem solving.
The key set of features that distinguishes Claire from other programming languages has been dictated by experience in solving complex optimization problems.
Claire was created as a successor to LAURE, an expressive but complex language designed by Caseau in the 1980s that combined many paradigms.
Claire was intended to be both easier to learn than its predecessor and to impose no performance overhead relative to C++; it is thus a much smaller language, omitting features such as constraints and deductive rules, and is closer to C in spirit and syntax.
The new Claire 4 release brings gains in reliability (via Go's strength as underlying language) and in performance of compiler and interpreter.