A Method of Extracting Prolog Programming Techniques

We present a method of extracting the programming techniques employed in Prolog programs. Techniques are dynamic entities consisting of the syntax of the program and how it is used. The method records how subgoals are employed and uses this, together with their syntax and other auxiliary information, to partition the program into single-argument procedures possibly sharing variables. A technique is formally characterised as a sequence of such single-argument procedures. 1 Introduction The compactness of Prolog programs allows the easy detection of commonly occurring patterns in the code. These patterns are loosely named techniques [Bow92, Brn91, BBD + 91]. Prolog programming techniques are not directly expressed through specific syntactic primitives (e.g. "while" and "do-until" loops), but by the sophisticated use of the comparatively simple syntax of Prolog. In this report we describe an automated approach to extract the programming techniques of a given working Prolog program. A P..