Design and Implementation of Jump Tables for Fast Indexing of Logic Programs

The principal technique for enhancing the speed of clause resolution in logic programming languages, such as Prolog, is indexing. Given a goal, the primary objective of indexing is to quickly eliminate clauses whose heads do not unify with the goal. Efforts at maximizing the performance of indexing automata have focused almost exclusively on constructing them with small depth, which in turn translates into making fewer transitions. Performance of an automata also critically depends on its ability to make each transition efficiently. This is a problem that has largely been ignored and constitutes the topic of this paper.

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