A Refinement Calculus for Logic Programs
<|reference_start|>A Refinement Calculus for Logic Programs: Existing refinement calculi provide frameworks for the stepwise development of imperative programs from specifications. This paper presents a refinement calculus for deriving logic programs. The calculus contains a wide-spectrum logic programming language, including executable constructs such as sequential conjunction, disjunction, and existential quantification, as well as specification constructs such as general predicates, assumptions and universal quantification. A declarative semantics is defined for this wide-spectrum language based on executions. Executions are partial functions from states to states, where a state is represented as a set of bindings. The semantics is used to define the meaning of programs and specifications, including parameters and recursion. To complete the calculus, a notion of correctness-preserving refinement over programs in the wide-spectrum language is defined and refinement laws for developing programs are introduced. The refinement calculus is illustrated using example derivations and prototype tool support is discussed.<|reference_end|>
@article{hayes2002a,
    title={A Refinement Calculus for Logic Programs},
    author={Ian Hayes, Robert Colvin, David Hemer, Paul Strooper, Ray Nickson},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0202002},
    year={2002},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cs/0202002},
    primaryClass={cs.SE cs.LO}
}