A Framework for bottom up specialisation of logic programs

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998. In this paper, we develop a solid theoretical foundation for a bottom up program transformation, capable of specialising a logic program with respect to a set of unit clauses. Extending a well-known operator, originally introduced for composing logic programs, we define a bottom up partial deduction operator and prove correctness of the transformation with respect to the S-semantics. We also show how, within this framework, a concrete control strategy can be designed. The transformation can be used as a stand-alone specialisation technique, useful when a program needs to be specialised w.r.t. its internal structure (e.g. a library of predicates w.r.t. an abstract data type) instead of a goal. On the other hand, the bottom up transformation can be combined with a more traditional top down partial deduction strategy. We conjecture that such a combined approach will finally enable good automatic specialisation of meta-programs.status: publishe