The Ciao Preprocessor

CiaoPP is the abstract interpretation-based preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm program development environment.

CiaoPP can perform a number of program debugging, analysis, and source-to-source transformation tasks on (Ciao) Prolog programs. These tasks include:

• Inference of properties of the predicates and literals of the program (types, modes and other variable instantiation properties, non-failure, determinacy, bounds on *computational cost, bounds on sizes of terms* in the program, etc.
• Certain kinds of static debugging and verification, finding errors before running the program. This includes checking how programs call system library predicates and also *checking the assertions* present in the program or in other modules used by the program. Such assertions represent essentially partial specifications of the program.
• Several kinds of source to source program transformations such as program specialization, slicing, partial evaluation of a program, program parallelization (taking granularity control into account), inclusion of run-time tests for assertions which cannot be checked completely at compile-time, etc.

The information generated by analysis, the assertions in the system specifications are all written in the same assertion language, which is in turn also used by the Ciao system documentation generator, lpdoc.

CiaoPP is distributed under the GNU general public license.