Backtrackable State with Linear Assumptions, Continuations and Hidden Accumulator Grammars

A set of executable speciications and eecient implementations of backtrackable state persisting over the current AND-continuation is investigated. At speciication level, our primitive operations are a variant of linear and intu-itionistic implications, having as consequent the current continuation. On top of them, we introduce a form of hypothetical assumptions which use no explicit quan-tiiers and have an easy and eecient implementation on top of logic programming systems featuring backtrackable destructive assignment, global variables and simple speciications in term of translation to side-eeect free Prolog. A variant of Extended DCGs handling multiple streams without the need of a preprocessing technique, Hidden Accumulator Grammars (HAGs), are speciied in terms of linear assumptions. For HAGs, eeciency comparable to that of pre-processing techniques is obtained through a WAM-level implementation of back-trackable destructive assignment, supporting non-deterministic execution based on value-trailing, while collapsing to a form of in-place update in case of deterministic execution. Not restricted to Prolog, the techniques described in the paper are portable to alternative logic programming languages like Life, Lolli and Prolog.

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