Abstract
Prolog is traditionally not statically typed. Since the benefits of static typing are huge, it was decided to grow a portable type system inside two widely used open source Prolog systems: SWI-Prolog and Yap. This requires close cooperation and agreement between the two systems. The type system is Hindley-Milner. The main characteristics of the introduction of types in SWI and Yap are that typing is not mandatory, that typed and untyped code can be mixed, and that the type checker can insert dynamic type checks at the boundaries between typed and untyped code. The basic decisions and the current status of the Typed Prolog project are described, as well as the remaining tasks and problems to be solved.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Milner, R.: A theory of type polymorphism in programming. Journal of Computer System Sciences 17, 348–375 (1978)
Mycroft, A., O’Keefe, R.A.: A polymorphic type system for prolog. Artif. Intell. 23(3), 295–307 (1984)
Hill, P.M., Lloyd, J.W.: The Gödel Programming Language. MIT Press, Cambridge (1994)
Somogyi, Z., Henderson, F., Conway, T.: The execution algorithm of mercury: an efficient purely declarative logic programming language. Journal of Logic Programming 29, 17–64 (1996)
Pietrzak, P., Correas, J., Puebla, G., Hermenegildo, M.: A Practical Type Analysis for Verification of Modular Prolog Programs. In: ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM 2008), pp. 61–70. ACM Press, New York (2008)
Prolog Development Center (Visual Prolog), http://www.visual-prolog.com
Hill, P.M., Topor, R.: A semantics for Typed Logic Programs. In: Pfenning, M. (ed.) Types in Logic Programming, pp. 1–62. MIT Press, Cambridge (1992)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schrijvers, T., Santos Costa, V., Wielemaker, J., Demoen, B. (2008). Towards Typed Prolog. In: Garcia de la Banda, M., Pontelli, E. (eds) Logic Programming. ICLP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89982-2_59
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89982-2_59
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89981-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89982-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)