Developing Correct and Efficient Logic Programs by Transformation

this paper, from formal specifications one may obtain executable, efficient programs by using techniques for transforming logic programs. This is, indeed, one of the reasons that makes logic programming very attractive for program construction. During this final step from specifications to programs, in order to improve efficiency one may want to use program transformation for avoiding multiple visits of data structures, or replacing complex forms of recursion by tail recursion, or reducing nondeterminism of procedures. This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we present the rule-based approach to program transformation and its use for the derivation and synthesis of logic programs from specifications. In Section 3 we consider the schema-based transformation technique for the development of efficient programs. In Section 4 we consider the partial evaluation technique and its use for the specialization of logic programs when the input data are partially known at compile time. In the final section we discuss some of the achievements and challanges of program transformation as a tool for logic-based software engineering. For simplicity reasons in this paper we will only consider definite logic programs, although most of the techniques we will describe can be applied also in the case of general logic programs. We refer to [35, 41] for all notions concerning logic programming and logic program transformation which are not explicitly presented here