Can Dynamic Analysis Make Prolog Fast?

interpretation is not without drawbacks. The algorithms involved can be difficult to implement and the resulting implementations slow. Although these problems can be remedied to some extent by employing a clear theoretical framework and employing suitable care in implementation, incorporating abstract interpretation into a Prolog implementation is far from easy. More troubling is that some non-logical features of Prolog present great difficulties to abstract interpretation. The worst of these is the construction at execution time of new calls to predicates. This can occur directly through the built-in predicate call/1 or less directly through the creation of predicates via assert/1 which are then executed. Implementations dependent on abstract interpretation presumably must either forbid such operations or force the user to provide information about them. It seems likely that this will be a problem for any method of static analysis.