"Claus Reinke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Fergus (and others): how about compiling a summary of the
> relationships (a kind of dictionary of terminologies) ? In
> particular, what is the state of the art in logic programming
> wrt determinism and termination analysis? Can you
> recommend any recent surveys, or can anyone offhand
> propose "nicer" constraints to ensure termination and
> determinism (of executions, not results), compared to
> those currently used for type classes?
My former thesis adviser, David McAllester, did some work on efficient
(and hence terminating) execution of logic programs that may be
relevant here. You might be interested in
http://www.research.att.com/~dmac/kr92.ps
(and several of his other papers).
There are also simpler methods for determining termination. One
simple constraint which proves termination is that every proper
subterm of an "antecedent" must also be a proper subterm of the
"conclusion". An instance declaration like
(P (F [a]) (G [(a, b)]) (H a [b]), Q b a) => (R (H (F [a]) [(G [(a, b)])]) (H a
[b]) c)
would thus be acceptable.
Of course, this does not prove determinism. I think that is probably
the harder of the two problems.
Carl Witty
