Abstract: The development of network technology and the increasing type number of heterogeneous computational devices have brought lots of challenges to network protocol design. The fundamental problem in front of the network protocol designer is how to get rid of the tedious protocol implementation details and pay their attention mainly to the design of protocol function. Recent ycars,for sake of solving this problem,the declarative networking programming language has been proposed. The declarative networking programming language has absorbed the experience of database management system's success and divided the network into logical level and physical level. The network protocol designers only need to use the high-level programming abstraction provided by declarative networking programming language to design the function of network protocol and don't need to take care of the tedious physical implementation.This paper surveyed the development of declarative networking programming language through analyzing and comparing different declarative networking programming languages. Besides, we pointed out the problems that should be paid attention to by further research work.

Key words: Declarative, Programming abstraction, Logical level, Physical level