Abstract. Program slicing is a well-known methodology that aims at identifying the program statements that (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest. Within imperative programming, this technique has been successfully applied to debugging, specialization, reuse, maintenance, etc. Due to its declarative nature, adapting the slicing notions and techniques to a logic programming setting is not an easy task. In this work, we define the first, semantics-preserving, forward slicing technique for logic programs. Our approach relies on the application of a conjunctive partial deduction algorithm for a precise propagation of information between calls. We do not distinguish between static and dynamic slicing since partial deduction can naturally deal with both static and dynamic data. A slicing tool has been implemented in ecce, where a post-processing transformation to remove redundant arguments has been added. Experiments conducted on a wide variety of programs are encouraging and demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, both as a classical slicing method and as a technique for code size reduction. 1

Interpretation ". Danny De Schreye is Senior Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research --- Flanders Belgium. Authors' addresses: M. Leuschel, B. Martens and D. De Schreye, Departement Computerwetenschappen, K.U.Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium. E-mail : fmichael,bern,dannydg@cs.kuleuven.ac.be Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publicati...

Partial deduction based upon the Lloyd and Shepherdson framework generates a specialised program given a set of atoms. Each such atom represents all its instances. This can severely limit the specialisation potential of partial deduction. We therefore extend the precision the Lloyd and Shepherdson approach by integrating ideas from constraint logic programming. We formally prove correctness of this new framework of constrained partial deduction and illustrate its potential on some examples.