Foundations of Equational Logic Programming (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 353)

Equations play a vital role in many fields of mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Therefore, many proposals have been made to integrate equational, functional, and logic programming. This book presents the foundations of equational logic programming. After generalizing logic programming by augmenting programs with a conditional equational theory, the author defines a unifying framework for logic programming, equation solving, universal unification, and term rewriting. Within this framework many known results are developed. In particular, a presentation of the least model and the fixpoint semantics of equational logic programs is followed by a rigorous proof of the soundness and the strong completeness of various proof techniques: SLDE-resolution, where a universal unification procedure replaces the traditional unification algorithm; linear paramodulation and special forms of it such as rewriting and narrowing; complete sets of transformations for conditional equational theories; and lazy resolution combined with any complete set of inference rules for conditional equational theories.