Logic Program Specialisation: How to Be More Specific (Abstract)

Standard partial deduction suffers from several drawbacks when compared to top-down abstract interpretation schemes. Conjunctive partial deduction, an extension of standard partial deduction, remedies one of those, namely the lack of side-ways information passing. But two other problems remain: the lack of success-propagation as well as the lack of inference of global success-information. We illustrate these drawbacks and show how they can be remedied by combining conjunctive partial deduction with an abstract interpretation technique known as more specific program construction. We present a simple, as well as a more refined integration of these methods. Finally we illustrate the practical relevance of this approach for some advanced applications, where it surpasses the precision of current abstract interpretation techniques.