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

  • Krzysztof R. Apt
  • Elena Marchiori
  • Catuscia Palamidessi
Article
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Abstract

We provide here a framework for studying Prolog programs with various built-in's that include arithmetic operations, and such metalogical relations likevar andground. 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].

Keywords

Prolog programs Builtin's Declarative semantics Termination 

1991 Mathematics Subject Classification

68Q40 68T15 

1991 CR Categories

F.3.2 F.4.1 H.3.3 I.2.3 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 1994

Authors and Affiliations

  • Krzysztof R. Apt
    • 1
    • 2
  • Elena Marchiori
    • 1
  • Catuscia Palamidessi
    • 3
  1. 1.CWIGB AmsterdamThe Netherlands
  2. 2.Faculty of Mathematics and Computer ScienceUniversity of AmsterdamTV AmsterdamThe Netherlands
  3. 3.Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell' InformazioneUniversità di GenevaGenovaItaly

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