Existing refinement calculi provide frameworks for the stepwise development
of imperative programs from specifications. This paper presents a refinement
calculus for deriving logic programs. The calculus contains a wide-spectrum
logic programming language, including executable constructs such as sequential
conjunction, disjunction, and existential quantification, as well as
specification constructs such as general predicates, assumptions and universal
quantification. A declarative semantics is defined for this wide-spectrum
language based on executions. Executions are partial functions from states to
states, where a state is represented as a set of bindings. The semantics is
used to define the meaning of programs and specifications, including parameters
and recursion. To complete the calculus, a notion of correctness-preserving
refinement over programs in the wide-spectrum language is defined and
refinement laws for developing programs are introduced. The refinement calculus
is illustrated using example derivations and prototype tool support is
discussed.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming (TPLP
