The semantics of constraint logic programs

Abstract

The Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) Scheme was introduced by Jaffar and Lassez. The scheme gave a formal framework, based on constraints, for the basic operational, logical and algebraic semantics of an extended class of logic programs. This paper presents for the first time the semantic foundations of CLP in a self-contained and complete package. The main contributions are threefold. First, we extend the original conference paper by presenting definitions and basic semantic constructs from first principles, giving new and complete proofs for the main lemmas. Importantly, we clarify which theorems depend on conditions such as solution compactness, satisfaction completeness and independenc..