Implementing Groundness Analysis with Definite Boolean Functions: 9th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2000 Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2000 Berlin, Germany, March 25 – April 2, 2000 Proceedings

The domain of definite Boolean functions, $\mydef$, can be used to express the groundness of, and trace grounding dependencies between, program variables in (constraint) logic programs. In this paper, previously unexploited computational properties of $\mydef$ are utilised to develop an efficient and succinct groundness analyser that can be coded in Prolog. In particular, entailment checking is used to prevent unnecessary least upper bound calculations. It is also demonstrated that join can be defined in terms of other operations, thereby eliminating code and removing the need for preprocessing formulae to a normal form. This saves space and time. Furthermore, the join can be adapted to straightforwardly implement the downward closure operator that arises in set sharing analyses. Experimental results indicate that the new $\mydef$ implementation gives favourable results in comparison with BDD-based groundness analyses.