Abstract
The well-founded model provides a natural and robust semantics for logic programs with negative literals in rule bodies. We implemented the well-founded semantics in the SLG-WAM of XSB [19]. Performance results indicate that the overhead of delay and simplification to Prolog — or tabled — evaluations is minimal. To compute the well-founded semantics, the SLG-WAM adds to an efficient tabling engine for definite programs three operations — negative loop detection, delay and simplification — which serve to detect, to break and to resolve cycles through negation that might arise in evaluating normal programs. XSB is a full Prolog system that closely approximates the ISO standard; additionally, it supports a tight integration of tabled predicates with nontabled predicates.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
F. Banchilhon, D. Maier, Y. Sagiv, and J. Ullman. Magic sets and other strange ways to implement logic programs. In PODS. ACM, 1986.
W. Chen, M. Kifer, and D. S. Warren. HiLog: A foundation for higher-order logic programming. J. Logic Programming, 15(3):187–230, 1993.
W. Chen and D. S. Warren. Tabled Evaluation with Delaying for General Logic Programs. Journal of the ACM, 43(1):20–74, January 1996.
M. Codish, B. Demoen, and K. Sagonas. XSB as the natural habitat for general purpose program analysis. Technical report, KU Leuven, 1996.
S. Dawson, C. R. Ramakrishnan, I. V. Ramakrishnan, K. Sagonas, S. Skiena, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. Unification factoring for efficient execution of logic programs. In Proc. of the 22nd POPL, pages 247–258. ACM, 1995.
S. Dawson, C. R. Ramakrishnan, and D. S. Warren. Practical program analysis using general purpose logic programming systems — a case study. In ACM PLDI, pages 117–126, 1996.
S. Dietrich. Extension Tables for Recursive Query Evaluation. PhD thesis, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1987.
J. Freire, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. Beyond Depth-First: Improving Tabled Logic Programs through Alternative Scheduling Strategies. In 8th International PLILP Symposium, number 1140 in LNCS, pages 243–258. Springer-Verlag, 1996.
M. Gelfond and V. Lifshitz. The stable model semantics for logic programming. In Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, pages 1070–1080, 1988.
D. Kemp and R. Topor. Completeness of a top-down query evaluation procedure for stratified databases. In Logic Programming: Proc. of the Fifth International Conference and Symposium, pages 178–194, 1988.
R. Larson, D. S. Warren, J. Freire, and K. Sagonas. Syntactica. MIT Press, 1995.
R. Larson, D. S. Warren, J. Freire, K. Sagonas, and P. Gomez. Semantica. MIT Press, 1997. To Appear.
T. Lindholm and R. O'Keefe. Efficient implementation of a defensible semantics for dynamic PROLOG code. In Proceedings of the 4th ICLP, pages 21–39, 1987.
W. Marek and M. Truszczyński, Autoepistemic Logic. Journal of the ACM, 38(3):588–619, July 1991.
T. Przymusinski. Every logic program has a natural stratification and an iterated least fixed point model. In PODS, pages 11–21, 1989.
I. V. Ramakrishnan, P. Rao, K. Sagonas, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. Efficient table access mechanisms for logic programs. In L. Sterling, editor, International Conference on Logic Programming, pages 697–711, 1995.
K. Ross. The Semantics of Deductive Databases. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, 1991.
K. Sagonas, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. XSB as an efficient deductive database engine. In Proc. of SIGMOD 1994 Conference. ACM, 1994.
K. Sagonas, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. An abstract machine for computing the well-founded semantics. In Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming., pages 274–289, 1996.
K. Sagonas, T. Swift, and D. S. Warren. The Limits of Fixed-Order Computation. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Logic in Databases, number 1154 in LNCS, pages 343–363, Italy, 1996. Springer-Verlag.
K. Sagonas and D. S. Warren. Efficient execution of HiLog in WAM-based Prolog implementations. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Logic Programming, pages 349–363, Japan, 1995.
H. Seki. On the power of Alexandrer templates. In Proc. of 8th PODS, pages 150–159. ACM, 1989.
H. Tamaki and T. Sato. OLDT resolution with tabulation. In Third International Conference on Logic Programming, pages 84–98, 1986.
A. van Gelder, K. Ross, and J. Schlipf. The Well-Founded Semantics for General Logic Programs. JACM, 38(3):620–650, 1991.
L. Vieille. Recursive query processing: The power of logic. Theoretical Computer Science, 69:1–53, 1989.
A. Walker. Backchain iteration: Towards a practical inference method that is simple enough to be proved terminating, sound, and complete. J. Automated Reasoning, 11(1):1–23, 1993. Originally formulated in New York University, 1981.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rao, P., Sagonas, K., Swift, T., Warren, D.S., Freire, J. (1997). XSB: A system for efficiently computing well-founded semantics. In: Dix, J., Furbach, U., Nerode, A. (eds) Logic Programming And Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1265. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63255-7_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63255-7_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63255-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69249-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive