Open AccessA Denotational Semantics for Logic Programming
Author(s) -
Gudmund Skovbjerg Frandsen
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
daimi pb
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2245-9316
pISSN - 0105-8517
DOI - 10.7146/dpb.v14i201.7552
Subject(s) - denotational semantics , denotational semantics of the actor model , normalisation by evaluation , well founded semantics , logic programming , programming language , domain theory , power domains , action semantics , axiomatic semantics , computer science , higher order logic , stable model semantics , operational semantics , theoretical computer science , modal μ calculus , semantics (computer science) , game semantics , multimodal logic , mathematics , discrete mathematics , power (physics) , zeroth order logic , description logic , physics , quantum mechanics
A fully abstract denotational semantics for logic programming has not been constructed yet. In this paper we present a denotational semantics that is almost fully abstract. We take the meaning of a logic program to be an element in a Plotkin power domain of substitutions. In this way our result shows that standard domain constructions suffice, when giving a semantics for logic programming. Using the well-known fixpoint semantics of logic programming we have to consider two different fixpoints in order to obtain information about both successful and failed computations. In contrast, our semantics is uniform in that the (single) meaning of a logic program contains information about both successful, failed and infinite computations. Finally, based on the full abstractness result, we argue that the detail level of substitutions is needed in any denotational semantics for logic programming.