On Structuring Contextual Logic Programs

Standardization for Prolog came during the 1990’s, initially and deliberately leaving out one aspect which is essential for real world application development: the modularity mechanism. This situation has in the meantime been remedied in the current ISO proposal for modules in Prolog. In this article we build on our previous work on Contextual Logic Programming (CxLP) and introduce mechanisms which provide much needed functionality: on one hand, a stricter specification for acceptable program structure when using contexts and, on the other, a mechanism which more effectively promotes OO-style code reuse and concealment, while retaining a lightweight syntax.