Program partition and logic program analysis

Abstract

A program partition scheme for stratified programs introduced by Apt et al. (1988) is used to study efficient computation of logic programs. We consider three types of program partitions and their corresponding graph representations: 1) the natural partition, 2) stratified partitions, and 3) the reduced partition. The natural (program) partition consists of definitions of relations, each definition being a subprogram. Subprograms of a program partition may consist of several relations. A partition graph is introduced for a program partition, each node of which corresponds to a subprogram. The partition graph for a stratified partition is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). A stratified partition decomposes a program into modules. The stratified partition with the maximum number of modules is the reduced partition. The cost to achieve a reduced partition is linear in the program size, using well known graph algorithms. We introduce the modular interpretations, which are equivalent in semantics to the standard interpretation. The modular interpretations offer encapsulation and may reduce the computation cost for some modules significantly. The modular approach can play an important role in query optimization, efficient termination, programming design, and software engineering. We classify query types and answer types then discuss query optimization for some query types. Many efficient query processing strategies are applicable to restricted subclasses of programs. The program partition method allows us to select the most efficient strategy for each module. For example, if a module is a uniformly bounded recursion, then the module can be terminated efficiently. If a module defines the transitive closure, then efficient program transformations may be applied to this module.