Compilation of bottom-up evaluation for a pure logic programming language

Abstraction in programming languages is usually achieved at the price of run time efficiency. This thesis presents a compilation scheme for the Starlog logic programming language. In spite of being very abstract, Starlog can be compiled to an efficient executable form. Starlog implements stratified negation and includes logically pure facilities for input and output, aggregation and destructive assignment. The main new work described in this thesis is (1) a bottom-up evaluation technique which is optimised for Starlog programs, (2) a static indexing structure that allows significant compile time optimisation, (3) an intermediate language to represent bottom-up logic programs and (4) an evaluation of automatic data structure selection techniques. It is shown empirically that the performance of compiled Starlog programs can be competitive with that of equivalent hand-coded programs

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2

"In The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in his manifesto essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Lewis challenged the visions of travel through time and space that were the mainstays of modern science fiction. In the facing corner, Günther recognized in American science fiction the first stirrings of a new mythic storytelling that would supplant the staple of an expiring metaphysics, the fairy-story basic to Tolkien and Lewis’s fantasy genre. The B-genres science fiction and fantasy were contemporaries of cinema’s emergence out of the scientific and experimental study and recording of motion made visible. In an early work like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which Tolkien credited as work of fantasy, the transport through time – the ununderstood crux of this literary experiment – is conveyed through a cinematic–fantastic component in the narrative, reflecting optical innovations and forecasting the movies to come. Although the historical onset of the rivalry between the B-genres is packed with literary examples, adaptation (acknowledged or not) followed out the rebound of wish fantasy between literary descriptions of the ununderstood and their cinematic counterparts, visual and special effects. The arrival of the digital relation out of the crucible of the unknown and the special effect seemed at last to award the fantasy genre the trophy in its contest with science fiction. And yet, although science fiction indeed failed to predict the digital future, fantasy did not so much succeed as draw benefit from the mere resemblance of fantasying to the new relation. While it follows that digitization is the fantasy that is true (and not, as Tolkien had hoped, the Christian Gospel), the newly renewed B-genre without borders found support in another revaluation that was underway in the other B-genre. Once its future orientation was “history,” science fiction began indwelling the ruins of its faulty forecasts. By its new allegorical momentum, science fiction supplied captions of legibility and history to the reconfigured borderlands it cohabited with fantasy. The second volume also attends, then, to the hybrids that owed their formation to these changes, both anticipated and realized. Extending through the topography of the borderlands, works by J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, and John Boorman, among others, occupy and cathect a context of speculative fiction that suspended and blended the strict contest requirements constitutive of the separate B-genres

Phenomenologies of Mars: Exploring Methods for Reading the Scientific Planetext Of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy

In 2013, The New Yorker Magazine called Kim Stanley Robinson ‘one of the greatest living science-fiction writers’. And in 2008, Time Magazine named him a ‘hero of the environment.’[1] Yet, no lengthy study has yet been attempted on any of his fiction. This thesis aims to redress this absence with a long-form reading of one of the high peaks of his achievement: the Mars Trilogy. It considers that what I am calling the ‘planetext’ (or planet-text) is a vital narrative space. It assumes the perspectival form in which the Trilogy is told is crucial to understanding how its planetexts are read. The several viewpoints in the Trilogy comprise the several attempts of this thesis toward understanding not only how the planet is used in the novels, but also how it arranges and functions according to textual principles of readability. My several readings adopt the scientific bases of each of these viewpoints, and develops a sense of the way different characters experience the planet around them as either enabled by science, or confounded by it. ‘Planetext’ is therefore a useful neologism for interpreting how such a vast and multidimensional site as Mars is, or is not, encountered through these sciences. Understanding the planetext of Mars is therefore a phenomenological task, with the requirement of reading how each character is able, or unable, to experience and comprehend their experiences. A sense of the phenomenologies of Mars means this thesis must take the approach of seeing how different sciences yield different phenomenologies, and different experiences of the planet. By calling Mars a planetext, this thesis investigates the ways in which language, writing, and textuality participate in building the planet of the Trilogy, treating writing as a coefficient of terraforming. Understood as a kind of planetography, or planetary writing, the planetext (or host of planetexts) foregrounds the written-ness of the Martian space in Robinson’s Trilogy. The planetextual space of the novels shapes a variety of readerly paths through the narrative, which are in turn adopted. As a long study, this thesis understands the planet as a sizeable arena, which challenges the view any one reading can give of it. Acknowledging this as a limitation, its four chapters focus only on four characters, aiming to supplement an overview style of reading the Trilogy with a series of close readings. Understanding the textual status of the planet means paying specific attention to how characters either find meaningful access to the planet, or fail to find any. For Ann Clayborne, a geologist who wants to keep Mars uncontaminated and un-colonized, the planetext forms itself as a zone of différance, in which the task of interpreting the non-living planet must coincide with her resistance to the terraforming project. With Michel Duval, the Martian psychiatrist, readability is itself questioned as he attempts to overcome his depression and homesickness. For Saxifrage Russell, one of the chief terraformers, a discussion over scientific method takes the path of this thesis away from the troubling and compromised planetexts of Ann and Michel, toward how textual meaning is enabled and opened. With Hiroko Ai, a final theorization of what I call viridical force is proposed as a planetextual function, based around the Trilogy’s mention of viriditas and Jacques Derrida’s idea of force, to come to terms with how the planet makes itself available to the reader as expansive, rich in possible meaning, and always arranging itself around the reader. Between the opening of the planetext and its equivocations, this thesis charts its course. [1] Tim Kreider, ‘Our Greatest Living Novelist?’ December 12, 2013. The New Yorker Magazine. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/our-greatest-political-novelist; Oliver Morton, ‘Kim Stanley Robinson: Heroes of the Environment 2008,’ Wednesday September 24, 2008. Time Magazine. http://content.time.com/ time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1841778_1841779_1841803,00.htm

“The Laurel Story”: An Industrial Intersection of Authorship, Cult Film and Independent Cinema in an American Motion Picture Production Company, 1963-1994

This thesis presents the first academic analysis of key US motion picture production company Laurel Entertainment. Established in Pittsburgh by Night of the Living Dead (1968) director George A. Romero and his business partner Richard P. Rubinstein, Laurel’s geographical and ideological separateness from bicoastal filmic centres was unprecedented. Yet despite being at the forefront of a number of practices that came to shape non-Hollywood production, including synergetic crossovers and diversification, Laurel has been neglected from previous investigations of the independent sector. This study traces Laurel’s growth from grassroots subsidiary to publicly-owned enterprise, revealing the strategic and creative thinking that ensured survival on the margins of the industry. Here, an analysis of the firm’s infrastructure employs a synthesis of ethnographic research, empirical data and business and economic theory, considering the complex array of stakeholders and changing opportunity structures that fed into and helped dictate output. Scrutiny of Laurel and its co-founders also provides new insight into the cinema of major genre filmmaker George Romero, while shedding light on the under-researched figure of the independent film producer. By looking towards the activities of the Laurel partners, this study offers a revisionist account of auteur filmmaking, cult film and independent cinema from a “real-world,” practitioner-level perspective, asking how these strands intersected within the firm and mapping out the innovations, compromises and contradictions of this convergence

Verification of Starlog programs

Starlog is a purely declarative, temporal, logic programming language. It supports both bottom-up and top-down execution and is well-suited to writing reactive programs. This paper presents a simple methodology for proving Starlog programs correct with respect to predicate calculus specifications. The promise of declarative programming languages is that they make it easier to write provably correct programs because the languages have simple semantics, so programs are more amenable to proof than imperative programs. However, this promise has not been fully delivered in languages such as Prolog, because the complexities of side-effects, negation-by-failure, incomplete search strategy etc. make it necessary to reason about its operational semantics, rather than the simpler declarative (logical) semantics. Furthermore, the pure subset of Prolog is not powerful enough to write reactive programs that perform I/O. In this paper we describe Starlog [SU99], a pure logic programming language with an explicit notion of time, and show that it has a simple and elegant proof theory whic