Efficiently Generating Efficient Generating Extensions in Prolog

The so called “cogen approach” to program specialisation, writing a compiler generator instead of a specialiser, has been used with considerable success in partial evaluation of both functional and imperative languages. This paper demonstrates that this approach is also applicable to partial evaluation of logic programming languages, also called partial deduction. Self-application has not been as much in focus in partial deduction as in partial evaluation of functional and imperative languages, and the attempts to self-apply partial deduction systems have, of yet, not been altogether that successful. So, especially for partial deduction, the cogen approach could prove to have a considerable importance when it comes to practical applications. It is demonstrated that using the cogen approach one gets very efficient compiler generators which generate very efficient generating extensions which in turn yield (for some examples at least) very good and non-trivial specialisation.