Super logic programs

Recent extensive research on non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming has clearly demonstrated that logic programs are sufficiently expressive to allow formalizations of many important problems in non-monotonic reasoning, as well as providing an important test bed for new such formalizations. However, standard logic programs suffer from some important limitations. Most importantly, they are unable to handle disjunctive information and they allow only one type of negation. Consequently, considerable interest and research effort has been recently given to the problem of finding a suitable extension of the logic programming paradigm. We argue that in order to demonstrate that a class of programs can be justifiably called an extension of logic programs one should be able to show that their syntax resembles the syntax of logic programs but it applies to a significantly broader class of programs and that their semantics constitutes an intuitively natural extension of the semantics of normal logic programs. Moreover, their semantics should be closely related to other well-established non-monotonic formalisms and there should exist a reasonably simple procedural mechanism allowing us to compute it. In this paper we propose a specific class of such logic programs which will be called super logic programs. We show that the class of super logic programs satisfies all of the above conditions, and, in addition, is sufficiently flexible to allow various application-dependent extensions and modifications. We also provide a brief description of a Prolog implementation of a query-answering interpreter for super programs. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RO 6844(1998,17) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman