Fast Logic Program Execution

This text documents the design and implementation of Aquarius Prolog, a high-performance logic programming system. The book details the internals of an optimizing Prolog compiler and should be of interest to those involved in implementing logic programming systems and compiler-writers. The book argues that Aquarius Prolog executes as quickly as popular imperative languages, such as C and PASCAL. Aquarius Prolog was designed together with the VLSI-BAM, a load-store processor with extensions for Prolog, as part of the Aquarius project at the University of California, Berkeley. This research effort was devoted to the implementation of high-performance inferencing systems and their application to computer architecture design. The Aquarius Prolog system is available without charge from the University of Southern California, USA. It runs under BSD Unix, includes full source code, is able to compile itself and has been ported to various processors including MIPS, SPARC and VLSI-BAM.