. Precise mode information is important for compiler optimisations and in program development tools. Within the framework of abstract compilation, the precision of a mode analysis depends, in part, on the expressiveness of the abstract domain and its associated abstraction function. This paper considers abstract domains for polymorphically typed logic programs and shows how specialised domains may be constructed for each type in the program. These domains capture the degree of instantiation to a high level of precision. By providing a generic definition of abstract unication, the abstraction of a program using these domains is formalised. The domain construction procedure is fully implemented using the Godel language and tested on a number of example programs to demonstrate the viability of the approach. Note: Some proofs have been omitted for space reasons. They can be found in the full version of this paper [17]. 1 Introduction 1.1 Background Typed logic programming languages su...

Declarative meta-programming is vital, since it is the most promising means by which programs can be made to reason about other programs. A metaprogram is a program that takes another program, called the object program, as data. A declarative programming language is a programming language based on a logic that has a model theory. A meta-program operates on a representation of an object...

. Analysis of (partial) groundness is an important application of abstract interpretation. There are several proposals for improving the precision of such an analysis by exploiting type information, including our own work [15], where we had shown how the information present in the type declarations of a program can be used to characterise the degree of instantiation of a term in a precise but finite way. This approach worked for polymorphically typed logic programs. Here, we recast this approach following [5, 11]. To formalise which properties of terms we want to characterise, we use labelling functions, which are functions that extract subterms from a term along certain paths. An abstract term collects the results of all labelling functions of a term. For the analysis, programs are executed on abstract terms instead of the concrete ones, and usual unification is replaced by unification modulo an equality theory which includes the well-known ACI-theory. Thus we generalise [5, 11] w.r.t. the type systems considered and relate those two works. 1