The ss-semantics approach; theory and applications

AbstractThis paper is a general overview of an approach to the semantics of logic programs whose aim is to find notions of models which really capture the operational semantics, and are, therefore, useful for defining program equivalences and for semantics-based program analysis. The approach leads to the introduction of extended interpretations which are more expressive than Herbrand interpretations. The semantics in terms of extended interpretations can be obtained as a result of both an operational (top-down) and a fixpoint (bottom-up) construction. It can also be characterized from the model-theoretic viewpoint, by defining a set of extended models which contains standard Herbrand models. We discuss the original construction modeling computed answer substitutions, its compositional version, and various semantics modeling more concrete observables. We then show how the approach can be applied to several extensions of positive logic programs. We finally consider some applications, mainly in the area of semantics-based program transformation and analysis

Nested Guarded Horn Clauses

This paper defines a new concurrent logic language, Nested Guarded Horn Clauses (NGHC). The main new feature of the language is its concept of guard. In fact, an NGHC clause has several layers of (standard) guards. This syntactic innovation allows the definition of a complete (i.e. always applicable) set of unfolding rules and therefore of an unfolding semantics which is equivalent, with respect to the success set, to the operational semantics. A fixpoint semantics is also defined in the classic logic programming style and is proved equivalent to the unfolding one. Since it is possible to embed Flat GHC into NGHC, our method can be used to give a fixpoint semantics to FGHC as well