NESTED GUARDED HORN CLAUSES

This paper defines a new concurrent logic language, Nested Guarded Horn Clauses (NGHC). The main new feature of the language is its concept of guard. In fact, an NGHC clause has several layers of (standard) guards. This syntactic innovation allows the definition of a complete (i.e. always applicable) set of unfolding rules and therefore of an unfolding semantics which is equivalent, with respect to the success set, to the operational semantics. A fixpoint semantics is also defined in the classic logic programming style and is proved equivalent to the unfolding one. Since it is possible to embed Flat GHC into NGHC, our method can be used to give a fixpoint semantics to FGHC as well.