Compilation of bottom-up evaluation for a pure logic programming language

Abstract

Abstraction in programming languages is usually achieved at the price of run time efficiency. This thesis presents a compilation scheme for the Starlog logic programming language. In spite of being very abstract, Starlog can be compiled to an efficient executable form. Starlog implements stratified negation and includes logically pure facilities for input and output, aggregation and destructive assignment. The main new work described in this thesis is (1) a bottom-up evaluation technique which is optimised for Starlog programs, (2) a static indexing structure that allows significant compile time optimisation, (3) an intermediate language to represent bottom-up logic programs and (4) an evaluation of automatic data structure selection techniques. It is shown empirically that the performance of compiled Starlog programs can be competitive with that of equivalent hand-coded programs.