Technical Report: DCC-98-13

The BEAM: A first EAM Implementation

Ricardo Lopes e Vítor Santos Costa

Departamento de Ciência de Computadores & LIACC
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto
Rua do Campo Alegre, 823 4150 Porto, Portugal

September 1997

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Abstract

Logic programming provides a high-level view of programming, giving implementors a vast latitude in what techniques to research towards obtaining the best performance for logic programs. One of the holy grails of logic programming has been to design computational models that could be executed efficiently and would allow for both a reduction of the search space and for exploiting all the available parallelism in the application. These goals have motivated the design of the Extended Andorra Model. We report on the design of a first implementation for the Extended Andorra Model with Implicit Control, the BEAM.

Keywords: Logic Programming, Implementation, Abstract Machines, Andorra.

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