Abstract
It is by now folklore that the bottom-up evaluation of a program after the “magic set” transformation is “as efficient as” top-down evaluation. There are a number of formalizations of this in the literature. However, the naive formalization is false: As shown by Ross, SLD-resolution can be much more efficient than bottom-up evaluation with magic sets on tail-recursive programs.
We show that this happens only for tail-recursive programs, and that the only problem of magic sets is the materialization of “lemmas”. So magic sets are always “as goal-directed as” SLD-resolution. These results are not surprising, but we believe that the variants given here are especially useful for teaching purposes. We also give rather simple proofs.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that SLD-resolution can be directly simulated by bottom-up evaluable programs if all recursions are tail-recursive. This is based on the meta-interpreter approach of Bry and seems to be very promising.
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© 1996 British Computer Society
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Brass, S. (1996). Magic Sets vs. SLD-Resolution. In: Eder, J., Kalinichenko, L.A. (eds) Advances in Databases and Information Systems. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1486-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1486-4_13
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