INTERPRETATION LUNJIN LU LIX Ecole Polytechnique 91128 Palaiseau Cedex France Abstract In this paper, we first introduce a notion of polymorphic abstract interpretation that formalises a polymorphic analysis as a generalisation of possibly infinitely many monomorphic analyses in the sense that the results of the monomorphic analyses can be obtained as instances of that of the polymorphic analysis. We then present a polymorphic type analysis of logic programs in terms of an abstract domain for polymorphic descriptions of type information and two operators on the abstract domain, namely the least upper bound operator and the abstract unification operator. The abstract domain captures type information more precisely than other abstract domains for similar purposes. The abstract unification operator for the polymorphic type analysis is designed by lifting the abstract unification operator for a monomorphic type analysis in logic programs, which simplifies the proof of the safeness of the...

Regular types are a powerful tool for computing very precise descriptive types for logic programs. However, in the context of real-life, modular Prolog programs, the accurate results obtained by regular types often come at the price of efficiency. In this paper we propose a combination of techniques aimed at improving analysis efficiency in this context. As a first technique we allow optionally reducing the accuracy of inferred types by using only the types defined by the user or present in the libraries. We claim that, for the purpose of verifying type signatures given in the form of assertions the precision obtained using this approach is sufficient, and show that analysis times can be reduced significantly. Our second technique is aimed at dealing with situations where we would like to limit the amount of reanalysis performed, especially for library modules. Borrowing some ideas from polymorphic type systems, we show how to solve the problem by admitting parameters in type specifications. This allows us to compose new call patterns with some precomputed analysis info without losing any information. We argue that together these two techniques contribute to the practical and scalable analysis and verification of types in Prolog programs.

presentada en la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid para la obtención del título de Doctor en Informática