To Parse or Not To Parse

Writing meta interpreters is a well-known technique to enhance the expressive power of logic programs. However, the resulting interpretation overhead considerably slows down program execution. A natural approach to solving this efficiency problem consists in specialising the interpreter with respect to a given object program, thus removing the overhead. Fully achieving the latter goal however, turns out to be a non trivial task. Satisfying results could often only be obtained at the cost of using not fully automatic and/or ad hoc techniques. In this paper, we reconsider the problem of specialising the vanilla meta interpreter through fully automatic and completely general methods. In particular, we study how the homeomorphic embedding relation guides specialisation of the interpreter. We focus on the so-called parsing problem, i.e. in essence removing metainterpretation overhead, in particular parsing conjunctive goals, and demonstrate that further control refinements are..