商品簡介
Investigating meta-programming within the logic programming paradigm, "Meta-Logics and Logic Programming" presents original research on an important extension of logic programming that makes it more amenable for knowledge representation and programming in general. The 12 contributions, many written especially for this book, explore the foundations, language design issues, and applications of meta-programming in logic programming. Meta-programming - the process of writing computer programmes that can manipulate representations of other programmes - has been key both in the foundations of computer science and in its practical developments.
Examples of meta-programmes include compilers, interpreters, programme analyzers, and partial evaluators. The choice of logic programming as a basis for metaprogramming offers several practical and theoretical advantages: among them, the possibility of tackling critical foundational problems of meta-programming within a strong theoretical framework, and the surprising ease of programming. The usual framework of logic programming (and more generally first-order logic), however, has to be modified and extended to formally deal with meta-programmes, extensions the editors call "meta-logics".
Along with an exploration of meta-programming in logic programming, the definitions, formal properties and use of these extensions constitute one of the books main themes. The first part of the book, Foundations, focuses on the representation problem - how object programmes are represented within meta-programmes. The second part, Language Support for Meta-Logics, is concerned with language extensions that make meta-programming easier and more elegant.
The third part, Meta-Logics for Knowledge Management, deals with the use of meta-logic for advanced knowledge representation purposes.
