Continuations for Parallel Logic Programming

Eneia Todoran and Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou

To appear at the 2nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP 2000), Montreal, Canada, September 20-22, 2000

Abstract

This paper gives denotational models for three logic programming languages of progressive complexity, adopting the ``logic programming without logic'' approach. The first language is the control flow kernel of sequential Prolog, featuring sequential composition and backtracking. A committed-choice concurrent logic language with parallel composition (parallel AND) and don't care nondeterminism is studied next. The third language is the core of Warren's basic Andorra model, combining parallel composition and don't care nondeterminism with two forms of don't know nondeterminism (interpreted as sequential and parallel OR) and favouring deterministic over nondeterministic computation. We show that continuations are a valuable tool in the analysis and design of semantic models for both sequential and parallel logic programming. Instead of using mathematical notation, we use the functional programming language Haskell as a metalanguage for our denotational semantics, and employ monads in order to facilitate the transition from one language under study to another.