Abstract

This brief historical note describes research which was done in the period 1970-1973, and where continuations were introduced in a fairly pragmatic way together with partial evaluation in order to compile "rules" expressed as statements in first-order predicate calculus. The methods used at that time were quite straight-forward, but they may be of some interest for the present workshop as an "early bird" result. 1 Background Around 1970, there was considerable interest in the artificial intelligence community for "programming language for AI". The mostly referenced competitors for the title were Planner [5] and QA4 [8], but there were also other proposals such as Pop-2 [2] and Lisp A [9]. At the time, I was starting a research group in this area at Uppsala University in Sweden. As it became increasingly evident that these languages were mostly used for deduction with the addition of certain additional techniques (such as non-monotonicity), we started to investigate the idea of using...

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