Abstract
This paper explores a seemingly very simple idea—an operation for extending a term with extra (start or end) arguments to yield a new term. This allows the definition a variety of structural operators that provide the power of functional composition and higher-order features on top of the non-directional and non-deterministic (relational) behavior of the underlying logic programming setting. Syntax alone is taken to be meaningless, semantics being associated to syntax in context. Multiple semantic views of each term are therefore possible, in different contexts. One such semantic view is structural, whereby any term is taken as an implicit abstraction of another term over some of its subterms. The standard operational semantics is extended with a rewrite step prior to each goal invocation, that appeals to a functional rewrite semantics to interpret certain terms as applications of implicit inner structural abstractions to inner arguments. The approach is first described through meta-level functional definitions, and then an implementation is shown through a collection of standard Prolog predicates. The powerful gain in expressiveness is thus achieved without any extension of the underlying machinery, much in the spirit of an old claim by D. H. Warren [5]. The scheme was motivated by the needs of a large real-world application [4] where it is now in use.
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References
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Porto, A. (2002). Structural Abstraction and Application in Logic Programming. In: Hu, Z., Rodríguez-Artalejo, M. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2441. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45788-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45788-7_17
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