THE EXECUTION ALGORITHM OF MERCURY, AN EFFICIENT PURELY DECLARATIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

We introduce Mercury, a new purely declarative logic programming langu age designed to provide the support that groups of application program mers need when building large programs. Mercury's strong type, mode, a nd determinism systems improve program reliability by catching many er rors at compile time. We present a new and relatively simple execution model that takes advantage of the information these systems provide, yielding very efficient code. The Mercury compiler uses this execution model to generate portable C code. Our benchmarking shows that the co de generated by our implementation is significantly faster than the co de generated by mature optimizing implementations of other logic progr amming languages.