Towards the Global Optimization of Functional Logic Programs

Abstract. Functional logic languages amalgamate functional and logic programming paradigms. They can be efficiently implemented by extending techniques known from logic programming. In this paper we show how global information about the call modes of functions can be used to optimize the compilation of functional logic programs. Since mode information has been successfully used to improve the implementation of pure logic programs and these techniques can be applied to implementations of functional logic programs as well, we concentrate on optimizations which are unique to the operational semantics of functional logic programs. We define a suitable notion of modes for functional logic programs and present compile-time techniques to optimize the normalization process during the execution of functional logic programs