A Tag-Frame System of Resource Management for Proof Search in Linear-Logic Programming

Abstract

In programming languages based on linear logic, the program can grow and shrink in a nearly arbitrary manner over the course of execution. Since the introduction of the I/O model of proof search [11, 12], a number of refinements have been proposed with the intention of reducing its degree of non-determinism [3, 4, 12, 13, 14]. Unfortunately each of these systems has had some limitations. In particular, while the resource management systems of Cervesato et al. [3, 4] and the frame system of López and Pimentel [14] obtained the greatest degree of determinism, they required global operations on the set of clauses which were suitable only for interpreter-based implementations. In contrast the level-tags system of Hodas, et al. relied only on relabeling tags attached to individual formulas, and was hence appropriate as the specification of an abstract machine. However it retained more non-determinism than the resource management systems. This led to a divergence in the operational semantics of the interpreted and compiled versions of the language Lolli. In this paper we propose a tag-frame system which recaptures the behavior of the resource management systems, while being appropriate as a foundation of a compiled implementation.