On Meta { Programming in CLP ( < )

The manipulation of CLP(<) programs in CLP(<) is severely limited, since equality for this language is not based on the syntactic structure of terms. We propose an extended language, CLP(< + M), which provides a basis for (a) coding terms in a form which allows arbitrary structural manipulation, and (b) converting between terms and their coded forms. Importantly, CLP(<+ M) may not only be used as a metalanguage for CLP(<), but also as its own metalanguage. Building on this extended language we propose an integrated set of system predicates for practical meta-programming.