Semantics-Directed Generation of a Prolog Compiler

Abstract In a recent paper [27], the denotational semantics for the language Prolog was presented. The aim was to define precisely the language. This paper goes further in this direction by describing how the denotational semantics of Prolog can be used to interpret and to compile Prolog programs, as well as to automatically generate a compiler for the language. Our approach is based on partial evaluation. Compilation is achieved by specializing the Prolog definition. The compiler is obtained by self-application of the partial evaluator. It is well-structured and the speed of the compiled code has been found to be about six times faster than interpretation. Our approach improves on previous work [14,22,32] in that: (i) it enables compiler generation and consequently speeds up the compilation process, and (ii) it goes beyond the usual mapping from syntax to denotations by processing the static semantics of the language definition.

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