The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language

  • Authors:
  • M. H. Van Emden;R. A. Kowalski

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1;Department of Computation & Control, Imperial College, 180 Queens Gate, London SW7, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1976

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Abstract

Sentences in first-order predicate logic can be usefully interpreted as programs. In this paper the operational and fixpoint semantics of predicate logic programs are defined, and the connections with the proof theory and model theory of logic are investigated. It is concluded that operational semantics is a part of proof theory and that fixpoint semantics is a special case of model-theoretic semantics.