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Efficient algebraic effect handlers for Prolog

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

AMR HANY SALEH  and
TOM SCHRIJVERS
AMR HANY SALEH
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Belgium, Department of Computer Science (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected])
TOM SCHRIJVERS
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Belgium, Department of Computer Science (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected])
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Abstract

Recent work has provided delimited control for Prolog to dynamically manipulate the program control-flow, and to implement a wide range of control-flow and dataflow effects on top of. Unfortunately, delimited control is a rather primitive language feature that is not easy to use.

As a remedy, this work introduces algebraic effect handlers for Prolog, as a high-level and structured way of defining new side-effects in a modular fashion. We illustrate the expressive power of the feature and provide an implementation by means of elaboration into the delimited control primitives.

The latter add a non-negligible performance overhead when used extensively. To address this issue, we present an optimised compilation approach that combines partial evaluation with dedicated rewrite rules. The rewrite rules are driven by a lightweight effect inference that analyses what effect operations may be called by a goal. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on a range of benchmarks.

Keywords

delimited controlalgebraic effect handlersprogram transformation
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 16 , Special Issue 5-6: 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming , September 2016 , pp. 884 - 898
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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