High-performance logic programming with the Aquarius Prolog compiler

Aquarius Prolog, a high performance compiler designed and built to test the hypothesis that Prolog can be implemented as efficiently as an imperative language by compiling the more powerful features of logic programming only where they are needed, and then only in the simplest form, is described. The authors begin with some background on logic programming and then discuss the Prolog language in more detail. They present an overview of their compiler, giving its structure and the principles underlying its high performance. They compare their system with two popular high-performance commercial systems and with two implementations of C and conclude with an overview of ways to extend this work.<>