🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10805@cs.tulane.edu> feldman@cs.tulane.edu (Damon Feldman) writes:
>What are the advantages to the formal semantics of (pure) Prolog?

It helps programming/debug directly. When I use assert/rectract,
variable state or constraint, I understand how much I rely on formal
semantics in writing program.

>In particular what are the individual advantages of the fixpoint
>semantics and the least model semantics?

The least model semantics is suitable for testting or verifing a
program, because it does not ask how to compute it. It also allows
negation in an easy way. Is not easy to acheive the least model
semantics, but once we have it, it is easy to determine if an instance
is an element of the least model or not, since it is a set.

The fixpoint semantics requires a link between the Prolog computation 
mechanism and the success set. Computing fixpoint is rather easier.
But sometimes we cannot understand what it means.

If you have the least model semantics a priori, that's better than the
fixpoint semantics. But you haven't, the fixpoint sematnics is better. 
-- 
Shinji Kono @ Computing Laboratory, University Newcastle upon Tyne
kono@csl.sony.co.jp                     Room: 616 Claremont Bridge
from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc, Japan.