A declarative approach for first-order built-in's of Prolog

Krzysztof R. Apt, Elena Marchiori, Catuscia Palamidessi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We provide here a framework for studying Prolog programs with various built-in's that include arithmetic operations, and such metalogical relations like var and ground. To this end we propose a new, declarative semantics and prove completeness of the Prolog computation mechanism w.r.t. this semantics. We also show that this semantics is fully abstract in an appropriate sense. Finally, we provide a method for proving termination of Prolog programs with built-in's which uses this semantics. The method is shown to be modular and is illustrated by proving termination of a number of programs including the unify program of Sterling and Shapiro [17].

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)159-191
Number of pages33
JournalApplicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing
Volume5
Issue number3-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 1994
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 68Q40, 68T15
  • Builtin's
  • Declarative semantics
  • F.3.2
  • F.4.1
  • H.3.3
  • I.2.3
  • Prolog programs
  • Termination

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