Abstract

Meta-programming in logic has had difficulty with a class of problems, which includes polymorphic type inferencing and Knuth-Bendix completion. At the core of this difficulty is that logic programming, in particular higher-order logic programming, is often too dependent on its inherent unification and resolution algorithms in providing declarative formulations of object-level theories. To free meta-programming in logic from this dependency, we provide logic programming formulations of substitution and unification on object-level expressions. This will provide a set of basic tools for meta-programming in a higher-order logic programming language, which supports the use of higher-order abstract syntax. In particular, the techniques presented here can be used in a very simple meta-language, the L restriction of Prolog.

Citations