On the power of meta-interpretation and partial evaluation in logic programming

Meta-interpretation and partial evaluation are considered to be two powerful techniques in artificial intelligence programming. Metainterpretation is rather flexible in treating programs as data. On the other hand, metainterpretation has a decisive disadvantage: its efficiency. Partial evaluation was used to remove the overhead of meta-programming by specializing the meta-program with respect to a given input to which the meta-program has to be applied. We implemented both meta-interpretation and partial evaluation in a comparably large system, an expertsystem shell based on logic programming. The major result was surprizing: In a more realistic application, meta-interpretation is much more powerful with respect to efficiency than expected. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 2036(15) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman