Partial evaluation of the “real thing”

Abstract

In this paper we present a partial evaluation scheme for a “real life” subset of Prolog. This subset contains first-order built-in's, simple side-effects and the operational predicate if-then-else. We outline a denotational semantics for this subset of Prolog and show how partial deduction can be extended to specialise programs of this kind. We point out some of the problems not occurring in partial deduction and show how they can be solved in our setting. Finally we provide some results based on an implementation of the above.