The Sidetracking Meta-Principle

The sidetracking principle is nothing but an instance of the well-known principle of procrastination, advising postponement of the problematic until the inevitable has been dealt with, in the hope that the problematic will either be no longer an issue or becomes less problematic. The aim of this paper is to show how the sidetracking principle as a method and technique is applicable to meta-interpreters for a variety of logic programming semantics. To this effect, we present sidetracking for logic programs in the form of an abstract and modular meta-interpreter schema which can be specialized for particular logic programming semantics. Besides, as a programming principle, it can benefit from, and be beneficial to, other declarative concepts and methods. We illustrate the approach and techniques by applying them to a variety of such semantics. In particular to one of the first implementations of Well Founded and Extended Stable Models Semantics, developed by us. This is, on its own, an important contribution of this paper regarding declarative logic programming implementation techniques. Introduction and motivation "In that which I now propose, we will discard the interior points [...], and concentrat