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Efficient algebraic effect handlers for Prolog.

Authors :
SALEH, AMR HANY
SCHRIJVERS, TOM
Carro, Manuel
King, Andy
Source :
Theory & Practice of Logic Programming; Sep2016, Vol. 16 Issue 5/6, p884-898, 15p
Publication Year :
2016

Abstract

Recent work has provided delimited control for Prolog to dynamically manipulate the program control-flow, and to implement a wide range of control-flow and dataflow effects on top of. Unfortunately, delimited control is a rather primitive language feature that is not easy to use.As a remedy, this work introduces algebraic effect handlers for Prolog, as a high-level and structured way of defining new side-effects in a modular fashion. We illustrate the expressive power of the feature and provide an implementation by means of elaboration into the delimited control primitives.The latter add a non-negligible performance overhead when used extensively. To address this issue, we present an optimised compilation approach that combines partial evaluation with dedicated rewrite rules. The rewrite rules are driven by a lightweight effect inference that analyses what effect operations may be called by a goal. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on a range of benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
14710684
Volume :
16
Issue :
5/6
Database :
Complementary Index
Journal :
Theory & Practice of Logic Programming
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
118851336
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1017/S147106841600034X