A Declarative View of Inheritance in Logic Programming
Michele Bugliesi · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 1991
In this paper we discuss a new semantic characterization of inheritance in logic programming.Our approach is inspired both by existing literature on denotational models for inheritance and by earlier work on the semantics of dynamic logic programs.We consider a general form of inheritance which incorporates notions such as overriding between inherited definitions and early/late binding for method invocation.The framework for our study is a general stateless language in which objects are represented as logic theories.The underlying idea, which we borrowed from previous proposals, is to use functions over Herbrand sets -rather than simple Herbrand sets -to interpret such theories.On this basis, we then develop a new logical model of inheritance which enables us to define the standard notions of operational, model-theoretic and fixpoint semantics and to state the classical result about their confluence.