Lix: An Effective Self-applicable Partial Evaluator for Prolog

Craig, S. J. and Leuschel, M. (2004) Lix: An Effective Self-applicable Partial Evaluator for Prolog. In: Functional and Logic Programming: 7th International Symposium, FLOPS 2004, April 7-9, 2004, Nara, Japan. pp. 85-99.

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Abstract

This paper presents a self-applicable partial evaluator for a
considerable subset of full Prolog.
The partial evaluator is shown to achieve non-trivial specialisation
and be effectively self-applied.
The attempts to self-apply partial evaluators for logic programs have, of yet, not been all that successful.
Compared to earlier attempts, our LIX
system is practically usable in terms
of efficiency and can handle natural
logic programming examples with partially static data structures,
built-ins, side-effects, and some higher-order and meta-level features such as
call and findall.
The LIX system is derived from the development of the LOGEN
compiler generator system. It achieves a similar kind of efficiency and
specialisation, but can be used for other applications.
Notably, we show first attempts at using the system for
deforestation and tupling in an offline fashion.
We will demonstrate that, contrary to earlier beliefs,
declarativeness and
the use of the ground representation is not the best way to achieve
self-applicable partial evaluators.

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