This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation, LOPSTR'96, held on board a ship sailing from Stockholm to Helsinki, in August 1996. The 17 revised full papers were carefully selected from a total of initially 27 submissions. The topics covered range over the areas of synthesis of programs from specifications, verification, transformation, specialization, and analysis of programs, and the use of program schemata in program development.

Program synthesis is a solution to the software crisis. If we had a program that develops correct programs from specifications, then program validation and maintenance would disappear from the software life-cycle, and one could focus on the more creative tasks of specification elaboration, validation, and maintenance, because replay of program development would be less costly. This monograph describes a novel approach to Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), which cross-fertilizes logic programming and machine learning. Aiming at the synthesis of recursive logic programs only, and this from incomplete information, we take a software engineering approach that is more appropriate than a pure artificial intelligence approach. This book is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in software engineering and artificial intelligence, and as a reference for practitioners of program synthesis.

Logic program synthesis and transformation are topics of central importance to the software industry. The demand for software can not be met by the current supply, in terms of volume, complexity, or reliability. The most promising solution seems to be the increased automation of software production: programmer productivity would improve, and correctness could be ensured by the application of mathematical methods. Because of their mathematical foundations, logic programs lend themselves particularly well to machine-assisted development techniques, and therefore to automation. This volume contains the proceedings of the second International Workshop on Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 92), held at the University of Manchester, 2-3 July 1992. The LOPSTR workshops are the only international meetings devoted to these two important areas. A variety of new techniques were described at the workshop, all of which promise to revolutionize the software industry once they become standard practise. These include techniques for the transformation of an inefficient program into an equivalent, efficient one, and the synthesis of a program from a formal specification of its required behaviour. Among the topics covered in this volume are: optimal transformation of logic programs; logic program synthesis via proof planning; deductive synthesis of programs for query answering; efficient compilation of lazy narrowing into Prolog; synthesis of narrowing programs; Logimix: a self-applicable partial evaluator for Prolog; proof nets; automatic termination analysis. Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation describes the latest advances in machine-assisted development of logic programs. It will provide essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students concerned with these two important areas.

This volume constitutes the combined proceedings of the 4th International Workshops on Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR '94) and on Meta-Programming (META '94), held jointly in Pisa, Italy in June 1994. This book includes thoroughly revised versions of the best papers presented at both workshops. The main topics addressed by the META papers are language extensions in support of meta-logic, semantics of meta-logic, implementation of meta-logic features, performance of meta-logic, and several applicational aspects. The LOPSTR papers are devoted to unfolding/folding, partial deduction, proofs as programs, inductive logic programming, automated program verification, specification and programming methodologies.

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