Skeletons and Techniques for the Systematic Development of Constraint Logic Programs

We study the systematic development of Constraint Logic Programs from the viewpoint of Skeletons and Techniques as described by Kirschenbaum and Sterling. We describe a number of fundamental skeleton classes for CLP, and generalize the notion of skeletons to deal with non-structural recursion. Then we describe a range of useful techniques for extending these skeletons. Furthermore, we introduce important classes of techniques that alter the control ow of skeletons in certain well-deened and desirable ways. This work represents a step towards understanding how to develop complex CLP programs easily, and is expected to contribute to the adoption of CLP for applications projects. It may also lead to the development of semi-automated program development tools. Finally, it helps to justify a substantial body of present work on CLP compiler optimizations that depends on the procedure level structure of programs.