This paper presents for the first time the semantic foundations of CLP in a self-contained and complete package. The main contributions are threefold. First, we extend the original conference paper by presenting definitions and basic semantic constructs from first principles, giving new and complete proofs for the main lemmas. Importantly, we clarify which theorems depend on conditions such as solution compactness, satisfaction completeness and independence of constraints. Second, we generalize the original results to allow for incompleteness of the constraint solver. This is important since almost all CLP systems use an incomplete solver. Third, we give conditions on the (possibly incomplete) solver which ensure that the operational semantics is confluent, that is, has independence of literal scheduling.

This paper surveys various complexity results on different forms of logic programming. The main focus is on decidable forms of logic programming, in particular, propositional logic programming and datalog, but we also mention general logic programming with function symbols. Next to classical results on plain logic programming (pure Horn clause programs), more recent results on various important extensions of logic programming are surveyed. These include logic programming with different forms of negation, disjunctive logic programming, logic programming with equality, and constraint logic programming. The complexity of the unification problem is also addressed.

The paper is a general overview of an approach to the semantics of logic programs whose aim is finding notions of models which really capture the operational semantics, and are therefore useful for defining program equivalences and for semantics-based program analysis. The approach leads to the introduction of extended interpretations which are more expressive than Herbrand interpretations. The semantics in terms of extended interpretations can be obtained as a result of both an operational (top-down) and a fixpoint (bottom-up) construction. It can also be characterized from the model-theoretic viewpoint, by defining a set of extended models which contains standard Herbrand models. We discuss the original construction modeling computed answer substitutions, its compositional version and various semantics modeling more concrete observables. We then show how the approach can be applied to several extensions of positive logic programs. We finally consider some applications, mainly in the area of semantics-based program transformation and analysis.

This paper presents a formal semantic basis for the termination analysis of logic programs. The semantics exhibits the termination properties of a logic program through its binary unfoldings --- a possibly infinite set of binary clauses. Termination of a program P and goal G is determined by the absence of an infinite chain in the binary unfoldings of P starting with G. The result is of practical use as basing termination analysis on a formal semantics facilitates both the design and implementation of analyzers. A simple Prolog interpreter for binary unfoldings coupled with an abstract domain based on symbolic norm constraints is proposed as an implementation vehicle. We illustrate its application using two recently proposed abstract domains. Both techniques are implemented using a standard CLP(R) library. The combination of an interpreter for binary unfoldings and a constraint solver simplifies the design of the analyzer and improves its efficiency significantly. 1 Introduction This ...

Interpretation of Logic Programs Roberto Barbuti , Roberto Giacobazzi , Giorgio Levi Dipartimento di Informatica Universit`a di Pisa Corso Italia 40, 56125 Pisa fbarbuti,giaco,levig@di.unipi.it in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Vol 15, January 1993 Abstract The theory of abstract interpretation provides a formal framework to develop advanced dataflow analysis tools. The idea is to define a non-standard semantics which is able to compute, in finite time, an approximated model of the program. In this paper we define an abstract interpretation framework based on a fixpoint approach to the semantics. This leads to the definition, by means of a suitable set of operators, of an abstract fixpoint characterization of a -model associated with the program. Thus, we obtain a specializable abstract framework for bottom-up abstract interpretations of definite logic programs. The specialization of the framework is shown on two examples, namely ground dependence analysis and depth-k analysis.

In this paper, we present a specialised semantics for logic programs. It is a generalization of the s-semantics [16] and it is intended to describe program behaviour whenever some constraints on procedure calls are assumed. Both operational and fixpoint constructions are defined. They characterize successful derivations of programs where only atoms satisfying a given call-condition are selected. The concept of specialisable call correct (s.c.c., in short) program with respect to a given call-condition is introduced. We show that specialisable call correct programs can be transformed into call-correct ones. A sufficient condition to verify specialisable call correctness is stated.

Abstract This paper presents a formal framework for the bottom-up abstract interpretation of logic programs which can be applied to approximate answer substitutions, partial an- swer substitutions and call patterns for a given program and arbitrary initial goal. The framework is based on a T P like semantics defined over a Herbrand universe with vari-ables which has previously been shown to determine the answer substitutions for arbitrary initial goals. The first part of the paper reconstructs this semantics to provide a more adequate basis for abstract interpretation. A notion of abstract substitution is introduced and shown to determine an abstract semantic function which for a given program can be applied to approximate the answer substitutions for an arbitrary initial goal.

This paper describes a semantic basis for a compositional approach to the analysis of logic programs. A logic program is viewed as consisting of a set of modules, each module defining a subset of the program's predicates. Analyses are constructed by considering abstract interpretations of a compositional semantics. The abstract meaning of a module corresponds to its analysis and composition of abstract meanings corresponds to composition of analyses. Such an approach is essential for large program development so that altering one module does not require re-analysis of the entire program. A compositional analysis for ground dependencies is included to illustrate the approach. To the best of our knowledge this is the first account of a compositional framework for the analysis of (logic) programs. 1 Introduction It is widely acknowledged that as the size of a program increases, it becomes impractical to maintain it as a single monolithic structure. Instead, the program has to be...

This paper presents a new notion of typing for logic programs which generalizes the notion of directional types. The generation of type dependencies for a logic program is fully automatic with respect to a given domain of types. The analysis method is based on a novel combination of program abstraction and ACI-unification which is shown to be correct and optimal. Type dependencies are obtained by abstracting programs, replacing concrete terms by their types, and evaluating the meaning of the abstract programs using a standard semantics for logic programs enhanced by ACI-unification. This approach is generic and can be used with any standard semantics. The method is both theoretically clean and easy to implement using general purpose tools. The proposed domain of types is condensing which means that analyses can be carried out in both top-down or bottom-up frameworks with no loss of precision for goal-independent analyses. The proposed method has been fully implemented within a bottom-up approach and the experimental results are promising.

The constraint logic programming paradigm CLP(X) (CLP for short) has been proposed by Jaffar and Lassez in order to integrate a generic computational mechanism based on constraints with the logic programming framework. This paradigm retains the semantic properties of logic languages, namely the existence of equivalent operational, model theoretic and fixpoint semantics. Moreover, since computation is performed over the particular domain of computation X , CLP(X) programs have an equivalent "algebraic" semantics, i.e. a semantics which is defined directly on the algebraic structure of the domain X . In this paper we propose an extension of such a semantics, for the success set case, in order to fully characterize the operational behaviour of programs. We introduce a framework for defining various notions of models, each corresponding to a specific operationally observable property. The construction is based on a new notion of interpretation (set of constrained atoms), on a natural exten...