Applications of the Situation Calculus To Formalizing Control and Strategy Information: The Prolog Cut Operator

We argue that the situation calculus is a natural formalism for representing and reasoning about control and strategic information. As a case study, in this paper we provide a situation calculus semantics for the Prolog cut operator, the central search control operator in Prolog. We show that our semantics is well-behaved when the programs are properly stratif ied. We also show that according to this semantics, the conventional implementation of the negationas-failure operator using cut is provably correct w i th respect to the stable model semantics.