Predicate Specialization for Definitional Higher-order Logic Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a program specialization technique using partial evaluation to transform certain higher-order logic programs into efficient first-order programs, enabling execution with standard interpreters and potential optimizations.

Contribution

It presents a novel partial evaluation method for higher-order logic programs that produces first-order equivalents without extra data structures.

Findings

Transformations improve execution efficiency.

First-order programs are compatible with existing interpreters.

Experimental results support the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

Higher-order logic programming is an interesting extension of traditional logic programming that allows predicates to appear as arguments and variables to be used where predicates typically occur. Higher-order characteristics are indeed desirable but on the other hand they are also usually more expensive to support. In this paper we propose a program specialization technique based on partial evaluation that can be applied to a modest but useful class of higher-order logic programs and can transform them into first-order programs without introducing additional data structures. The resulting first-order programs can be executed by conventional logic programming interpreters and benefit from other optimizations that might be available. We provide an implementation and experimental results that suggest the efficiency of the transformation.