8,584 research outputs found
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
Linear Tabulated Resolution Based on Prolog Control Strategy
Infinite loops and redundant computations are long recognized open problems
in Prolog. Two ways have been explored to resolve these problems: loop checking
and tabling. Loop checking can cut infinite loops, but it cannot be both sound
and complete even for function-free logic programs. Tabling seems to be an
effective way to resolve infinite loops and redundant computations. However,
existing tabulated resolutions, such as OLDT-resolution, SLG- resolution, and
Tabulated SLS-resolution, are non-linear because they rely on the
solution-lookup mode in formulating tabling. The principal disadvantage of
non-linear resolutions is that they cannot be implemented using a simple
stack-based memory structure like that in Prolog. Moreover, some strictly
sequential operators such as cuts may not be handled as easily as in Prolog.
In this paper, we propose a hybrid method to resolve infinite loops and
redundant computations. We combine the ideas of loop checking and tabling to
establish a linear tabulated resolution called TP-resolution. TP-resolution has
two distinctive features: (1) It makes linear tabulated derivations in the same
way as Prolog except that infinite loops are broken and redundant computations
are reduced. It handles cuts as effectively as Prolog. (2) It is sound and
complete for positive logic programs with the bounded-term-size property. The
underlying algorithm can be implemented by an extension to any existing Prolog
abstract machines such as WAM or ATOAM.Comment: To appear as the first accepted paper in Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming (http://www.cwi.nl/projects/alp/TPLP
Bridging the Gap between Object-oriented and Logic Programming
A description is given of an interface that was developed between Loops and Xerox Quintus Prolog. Loops is an extension to the Xerox AI environment to support object-oriented programming; Xerox Quintus Prolog is a version of Prolog that runs on Xerox Lisp machines. Such a bridge enables all the support tools of both environments to be accessed, and degradation of performance that occurs when one language is implemented top of another is avoided. The interface has three layers. At the lowest level, a set of Prolog predicates gives the Prolog programmer access to Loops objects. This lowest level is the bridge from Prolog to Loops. At the next level, programming tools in the Loops environment let object methods be defined in Prolog. At the highest level, the Prolog programmer can treat Prolog clauses as Loops objects that can be manipulated outside the Prolog database. Each layer can be used independently
Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography
An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State
Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm
Applying Prolog to Develop Distributed Systems
Development of distributed systems is a difficult task. Declarative
programming techniques hold a promising potential for effectively supporting
programmer in this challenge. While Datalog-based languages have been actively
explored for programming distributed systems, Prolog received relatively little
attention in this application area so far. In this paper we present a
Prolog-based programming system, called DAHL, for the declarative development
of distributed systems. DAHL extends Prolog with an event-driven control
mechanism and built-in networking procedures. Our experimental evaluation using
a distributed hash-table data structure, a protocol for achieving Byzantine
fault tolerance, and a distributed software model checker - all implemented in
DAHL - indicates the viability of the approach
Who watches the watchers: Validating the ProB Validation Tool
Over the years, ProB has moved from a tool that complemented proving, to a
development environment that is now sometimes used instead of proving for
applications, such as exhaustive model checking or data validation. This has
led to much more stringent requirements on the integrity of ProB. In this paper
we present a summary of our validation efforts for ProB, in particular within
the context of the norm EN 50128 and safety critical applications in the
railway domain.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578
Pengines: Web Logic Programming Made Easy
When developing a (web) interface for a deductive database, functionality
required by the client is provided by means of HTTP handlers that wrap the
logical data access predicates. These handlers are responsible for converting
between client and server data representations and typically include options
for paginating results. Designing the web accessible API is difficult because
it is hard to predict the exact requirements of clients. Pengines changes this
picture. The client provides a Prolog program that selects the required data by
accessing the logical API of the server. The pengine infrastructure provides
general mechanisms for converting Prolog data and handling Prolog
non-determinism. The Pengines library is small (2000 lines Prolog, 150 lines
JavaScript). It greatly simplifies defining an AJAX based client for a Prolog
program and provides non-deterministic RPC between Prolog processes as well as
interaction with Prolog engines similar to Paul Tarau's engines. Pengines are
available as a standard package for SWI-Prolog 7.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin
Optimizing the SICStus Prolog virtual machine instruction set
The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) is the vendor of SICStus Prolog.
To decrease execution time and reduce space requirements, variants of SICStus
Prolog's virtual instruction set were investigated. Semi-automatic ways of finding
candidate sets of instructions to combine or specialize were developed and used.
Several virtual machines were implemented and the relationship between improvements
by combinations and by specializations were investigated. The benefits of specializations
and combinations of instructions to the performance of the emulator is on the
average of the order of 10%. The code size reduction is 15%
Threads and Or-Parallelism Unified
One of the main advantages of Logic Programming (LP) is that it provides an
excellent framework for the parallel execution of programs. In this work we
investigate novel techniques to efficiently exploit parallelism from real-world
applications in low cost multi-core architectures. To achieve these goals, we
revive and redesign the YapOr system to exploit or-parallelism based on a
multi-threaded implementation. Our new approach takes full advantage of the
state-of-the-art fast and optimized YAP Prolog engine and shares the underlying
execution environment, scheduler and most of the data structures used to
support YapOr's model. Initial experiments with our new approach consistently
achieve almost linear speedups for most of the applications, proving itself as
a good alternative for exploiting implicit parallelism in the currently
available low cost multi-core architectures.Comment: 17 pages, 21 figures, International Conference on Logic Programming
(ICLP 2010
Comparing Tag Scheme Variations Using an Abstract Machine Generator
In this paper we study, in the context of a WAM-based abstract machine for Prolog, how variations in the encoding of type information in tagged words and in their associated basic operations impact performance and memory usage. We use a high-level language to specify encodings and the associated operations. An automatic generator constructs both the abstract machine using this encoding and the associated Prolog-to-byte code compiler. Annotations in this language make it possible to impose constraints on the final representation of tagged words, such as the effectively addressable space (fixing, for example, the word size of the target processor /architecture), the layout of the tag and value bits inside the tagged word, and how the basic operations are implemented. We evaluate large number of combinations of the different parameters in two scenarios: a) trying to obtain an optimal general-purpose abstract machine and b) automatically generating a specially-tuned abstract machine for a particular program. We conclude that we are able to automatically generate code featuring all the optimizations present in a hand-written, highly-optimized abstract machine and we canal so obtain emulators with larger addressable space and better performance
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