Abstract
Higher-order logic programming is an interesting extension of traditional logic programming that allows predicates to appear as arguments and variables to be used where predicates typically occur. Higher-order characteristics are indeed desirable but on the other hand they are also usually more expensive to support. In this paper we propose a program specialization technique based on partial evaluation that can be applied to a modest but useful class of higher-order logic programs and can transform them into first-order programs without introducing additional data structures. The resulting first-order programs can be executed by conventional logic programming interpreters and benefit from other optimizations that might be available. We provide an implementation and experimental results that suggest the efficiency of the transformation.
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- 1.
The implementation of the transformation is open source and can be accessed at http://bitbucket.org/antru/firstify.
- 2.
An edge from the predicate \(\mathsf {p}\) to predicate \(\mathsf {q}\) in the predicate dependency graph means that there exists a clause that \(\mathsf {p}\) appears in the head and \(\mathsf {p}\) appears in the body of the same clause.
- 3.
version 3.7, cf. http://xsb.sourceforge.net/.
- 4.
version 7.2.3, cf. http://www.swi-prolog.org/.
- 5.
version 6.2.2, cf. http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~vsc/Yap/.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments on our original submission.
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Troumpoukis, A., Charalambidis, A. (2019). Predicate Specialization for Definitional Higher-Order Logic Programs. In: Mesnard, F., Stuckey, P. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11408. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13838-7_8
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