Towards Resource Handling in Logic Programming: the PPL Framework and its Semantics

The PPL framework is proposed as a simple extension to logic programming aiming at handling resources. It is argued that the separation between logical treatments and resource handling is desirable and, to that end, resources are proposed to be manipulated by means of pre-and post-conditions associated with usual Horn clauses. The expressiveness of the resulting framework is evidenced through the coding of several applications involving objects, databases, actions and changes. Operational and declarative semantics are presented as well. The operational semantics rests on a derivation relation stating how goals and conditions are evaluated. The declarative semantics extends the classical model and xed-point theories to take into account the evaluation of pre-and post-conditions, and in particular the non-monotonic behavior of the world of resources they induce in general. As suggested, an eeort has been made to keep the work close to the classical logic programming setting. In particular, the semantics are in the main streams of logic programming semantics. However, the PPL framework raises new problems for which fresh solutions are proposed.