Live data structures in logic programs. Derivation by means of abstract interpretation (Q1308632)

The book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation and addresses the problem of memory reuse for logic programs, by considering the problem of liveness for the class of pure Horn clause logic programs. The aim is to derive run-time properties that can be used at compile time to specialize the target code for a given set of queries and to introduce destructive assignments in a safe and transparent way. The book includes six chapters and a bibliography. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 presents the principles of abstract interpretation for logic programs. Chapter 3 discusses work related to the application of compile-time garbage collection in the context of both logic and functional programming languages. Chapter 4 presents sharing analysis based on an abstract interpretation, and chapter 5 presents liveness analysis. The emphasis in chapters 4 and 5 is mainly on the precision and the soundness of the results that can be obtained, rather than on the efficiency of the analysis. Chapter 6 gives general conclusions and discussions of related work.