Essentials of Logic Programming

Presents the fundamentals of logic programming from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, covering various extensions of the formalism, its relationship to Prolog, its formal semantics and its applications to program analysis and transformation.

Logic programming has developed into a broad discipline within computing science. Besides its basic role as a declarative programming language, it is also contributing significantly to such fields as artificial intelligence, new-generation computing, software engineering and deductive databases. This new book presents the fundamentals of logic programming from both practical and theoretical viewpoints. It covers various extensions of the formalism, its relationship to Prolog, its formal semantics and its applications to program analysis and transformation. The text is illustrated with numerous diagrams. There are two distinguishing features of the book designed to make it adaptable to various forms of usage and accessible to various audiences. The material is organized into sixty modular themes, permitting many kinds of course to be based upon it; and it includes nearly seventy pages of detailed answers to all of the exercises posed in the themes.