Integrity constraints are very useful in many contexts, such as, for example, deductive databases, abductive and inductive logic programming. However, fully testing the integrity constraints after each update or modification can be very expensive and methods have been developed which simplify the integrity constraints. In this paper, we pursue the goal of writing this simplification procedure as a meta-program in logic programming and then using partial deduction to obtain pre-compiled integrity checks for certain update patterns. We argue that the ground representation has to be used to write this metaprogram declaratively. We however also show that, contrary to what one might expect, current partial deduction techniques are then unable to specialise this meta-interpreter in an interesting way and no pre-compilation of integrity checks can be obtained. In fact, we show that partial deduction (alone) is not able to perform any (sophisticated) specialisation at the object-level for meta...

Abstract. This paper presents a self-applicable partial evaluator for a considerable subset of full Prolog. The partial evaluator is shown to achieve non-trivial specialisation and be effectively self-applied. The attempts to self-apply partial evaluators for logic programs have, of yet, not been all that successful. Compared to earlier attempts, our lix system is practically usable in terms of efficiency and can handle natural logic programming examples with partially static data structures, built-ins, side-effects, and some higher-order and meta-level features such as call and findall. The lix system is derived from the development of the logen compiler generator system. It achieves a similar kind of efficiency and specialisation, but can be used for other applications. Notably, we show first attempts at using the system for deforestation and tupling in an offline fashion. We will demonstrate that, contrary to earlier beliefs, declarativeness and the use of the ground representation is not the best way to achieve self-applicable partial evaluators. Keywords: Partial