A Program Specialiser for Meta-level Compositions of Logic Programs

Brogi, Antonio and Contiero, Simone (1996) A Program Specialiser for Meta-level Compositions of Logic Programs. Technical Report del Dipartimento di Informatica . Università di Pisa, Pisa, IT.

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Abstract

Meta-level compositions of object logic programs are naturally implemented by means of meta-programming techniques. Meta-interpreters defining program compositions however suffer from a computational overhead that is due partly to the interpretation layer present in all meta-programs, and partly to the specific interpretation layer needed to deal with program compositions. We show that meta-interpreters implementing compositions of object programs can be fruitfully specialised w.r.t. meta-level queries of the form "Demo(E,G)" , where "E" denotes a program expression and "G" denotes a (partially instantiated) object level query. More precisely, we describe the design and implementation of a declarative program specialiser that suitably transforms such meta-interpreters so as to sensibly reduce --- if not to completely remove --- the overhead due to the handling of program compositions. In many cases the specialiser succeeds in eliminating also the overhead due to meta-interpretation.

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