Logic programming with typed unification and its realization on an abstract machine

Logic programming can benefit from a typing concept which supports many software engineering principles such as data abstraction, modularization, etc. From a computational point of view, the use of types can drastically reduce the search space. Starting from these observations, this paper gives a survey of many-sorted, order-sorted, and polymorphic approaches to type concepts in logic programming. The underlying unification procedures for ordinary term unification, order-sorted unification, and in particular for polymorphic order-sorted unification are given in the style of solving a set of equations, giving a common basis for comparing them. In addition, the realization of these unification procedures on a Warren Abstract Machine-like architecture is described. Special emphasis is placed on the abstract machine developed for PROTOS-L, a logic programming language based on polymorphic order-sorted unification.