期刊名称:Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
电子版ISSN:2075-2180
出版年度:2019
卷号:306
页码:224-237
DOI:10.4204/EPTCS.306.26
语种:English
出版社:Open Publishing Association
摘要:In recent years, stream processing has become a prominent approach for incrementally handling large amounts of data, with special support and libraries in many programming languages. Unfortunately, support in Prolog has so far been lacking and most existing approaches are ad-hoc. To remedy this situation, we present lazy stream generators as a unified Prolog interface for stateful computations on both finite and infinite sequences of data that are produced incrementally through I/O and/or algorithmically. We expose stream generators to the application programmer in two ways: 1) through an abstract sequence manipulation API, convenient for defining custom generators, and 2) as idiomatic lazy lists, compatible with many existing list predicates. We define an algebra of stream generator operations that extends Prolog via an embedded language interpreter, provides a compact notation for composing generators and supports moving between the two isomorphic representations. As a special instance, we introduce answer stream generators that encapsulate the work of coroutining first-class logic engines and support interoperation between forward recursive AND-streams and backtracking-generated OR-streams. Keywords: lazy stream generators, lazy lists, first-class logic engines, stream combinators, AND-stream / OR-stream interoperation, Prolog extensions