6 research outputs found
TOR: modular search with hookable disjunction
Horn Clause Programs have a natural exhaustive depth-first procedural
semantics. However, for many programs this semantics is
ineffective. In order to compute useful solutions, one needs the
ability to modify the search method that explores the alternative
execution branches.
Tor, a well-defined hook into Prolog disjunction, provides this ability.
It is light-weight thanks to its library approach and efficient
because it is based on program transformation.
Tor is general enough to mimic search-modifying
predicates like ECLiPSe's search/6. Moreover, Tor supports
modular composition of search methods and other hooks.
The Tor library is already
provided and used as an add-on to SWI-Prolog.publisher: Elsevier
articletitle: Tor: Modular search with hookable disjunction
journaltitle: Science of Computer Programming
articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2013.05.008
content_type: article
copyright: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe
Description and Optimization of Abstract Machines in a Dialect of Prolog
In order to achieve competitive performance, abstract machines for Prolog and
related languages end up being large and intricate, and incorporate
sophisticated optimizations, both at the design and at the implementation
levels. At the same time, efficiency considerations make it necessary to use
low-level languages in their implementation. This makes them laborious to code,
optimize, and, especially, maintain and extend. Writing the abstract machine
(and ancillary code) in a higher-level language can help tame this inherent
complexity. We show how the semantics of most basic components of an efficient
virtual machine for Prolog can be described using (a variant of) Prolog. These
descriptions are then compiled to C and assembled to build a complete bytecode
emulator. Thanks to the high level of the language used and its closeness to
Prolog, the abstract machine description can be manipulated using standard
Prolog compilation and optimization techniques with relative ease. We also show
how, by applying program transformations selectively, we obtain abstract
machine implementations whose performance can match and even exceed that of
state-of-the-art, highly-tuned, hand-crafted emulators.Comment: 56 pages, 46 figures, 5 tables, To appear in Theory and Practice of
Logic Programming (TPLP
Towards structured state threading in prolog
It is very often the case that programs require passing, maintaining, and updating some notion of state. Prolog programs often implement such stateful computations by carrying this state in predicate arguments (or, alternatively, in the internal datábase). This often causes code obfuscation, complicates code reuse, introduces dependencies on the data model, and is prone to incorrect propagation of the state information among predicate calis. To partly solve these problems, we introduce contexts as a consistent mechanism for specifying implicit arguments and its threading in clause goals. We propose a notation and an interpretation for contexts, ranging from single goals to complete programs, give an intuitive semantics, and describe a translation into standard Prolog. We also discuss a particular light-weight implementation in Ciao Prolog, and we show the usefulness of our proposals on a series of examples and applications, including code directiy using contexts, DCGs, extended DCGs, logical loops and other custom control structures