Sequence Quantification

摘要

Several earlier papers have shown that bounded quantification is an expressive and comfortable addition to logic programming languages. One shortcoming of bounded quantification, however, is that it does not allow easy and efficient relation of corresponding elements of aggregations being quantified over (lockstep iteration). Bounded quantification also does not allow easy quantification over part of an aggregation, nor does it make it easy to accumulate a result over an aggregation. We generalize the concept of bounded quantification to quantification over any finite sequence, as we can use a rich family of operations on sequences to create a language facility that avoids the weaknesses mentioned above. We also propose a concrete syntax for sequence quantification in Prolog programs, which we have implemented as a source-to-source transformation.