This thesis concerns the implementation of Lambda Prolog, a higher-order
logic programming language that supports the lambda-tree syntax approach to
representing and manipulating formal syntactic objects. Lambda Prolog achieves
its functionality by extending a Prolog-like language by using typed lambda
terms as data structures that it then manipulates via higher-order unification
and some new program-level abstraction mechanisms. These additional features
raise new implementation questions that must be adequately addressed for Lambda
Prolog to be an effective programming tool. We consider these questions here,
providing eventually a virtual machine and compilation based realization. A key
idea is the orientation of the computation model of Lambda Prolog around a
restricted version of higher-order unification with nice algorithmic properties
and appearing to encompass most interesting applications. Our virtual machine
embeds a treatment of this form of unification within the structure of the
Warren Abstract Machine that is used in traditional Prolog implementations.
Along the way, we treat various auxiliary issues such as the low-level
representation of lambda terms, the implementation of reduction on such terms
and the optimized processing of types in computation. We also develop an actual
implementation of Lambda Prolog called Teyjus Version 2. A characteristic of
this system is that it realizes an emulator for the virtual machine in the C
language a compiler in the OCaml language. We present a treatment of the
software issues that arise from this kind of mixing of languages within one
system and we discuss issues relevant to the portability of our virtual machine
emulator across arbitrary architectures. Finally, we assess the the efficacy of
our various design ideas through experiments carried out using the system
