Abstract

We argue that the situation calculus is a natural formalism for representing and reasoning about control and strategic information. As a case study, in this paper we provide a situation calculus semantics for the Prolog cut operator, the central search control operator in Prolog. We show that our semantics is well-behaved when the programs are properly stratified. We also show that according to this semantics, the conventional implementation of the negationas -failure operator using cut is provably correct with respect to the stable model semantics. 1 Introduction The situation calculus (McCarthy and Hayes [ 7 ] ) is a formalism for representing and reasoning about actions in dynamic domains. It is a many-sorted predicate calculus with some reserved predicate and function symbols. For example, to say that block A is initially clear, we write: H(clear(A); S 0 ); where H is a reserved binary predicate and stands for "holds", and S 0 is a reserved constant symbol denoting th...

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