Efficient Specialisation in Prolog Using a Hand-Written Compiler Generator

The so called "cogen approach" to program specialisation, writing a compiler generator instead of a specialiser, has been used with considerable success in partial evaluation of both functional and imperative languages. This paper demonstrates that this approach is also applicable to partial evaluation of logic programming languages, also called partial deduction. Self-application has not been as much in focus in logic programming as for functional and imperative languages, and the attempts to self-apply partial deduction systems have, of yet, not been altogether that successful. So, especially for partial deduction, the cogen approach should prove to have a considerable importance when it comes to practical applications. This paper first develops a generic offline partial deduction technique for pure logic programs, notably supporting partially instantiated datastructures via binding types. From this a very efficient cogen is derived, which generates very efficient generating extensio..