Introduction
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, including Types, modes (Groundness and sharing), Term structure, and other variable instantiation properties, non-failure, determinacy, bounds on computational cost (Number of resolution steps of the computation), bounds on Size of terms in the program, etc (see Available abstract domains).
- 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 abstract model of the program inferred by the analyzers is used in the system to certify that an untrusted mobile code is safe w.r.t. the given policy (i.e., an abstraction-carrying code approach to mobile code safety).
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.
How to use this manual
This is a reference manual. You can use it to look up in it descriptions for the commands, flags, and options that can be used with CiaoPP. The Predicate/Method Definition Index may help you in locating commands. The Regular Type Definition Index may help in locating the definitions of the types associated to the arguments of commands. The Concept Definition Index may help in locating the part of the manual where a particular feature of CiaoPP is described. The Global Index includes all of the above plus references to pages where the command, type, or concept is used (not necessarily defined).
This chapter gives a brief overview of CiaoPP and its capabilities. It assumes some familiarity with the techniques that implement such functionalities. However, references are included to technical papers that explain in detail such techniques. An overview of the functionalities available is given in [BLGPH06] in the form of a tutorial on CiaoPP.
Note
We are in the process of merging all CiaoPP functionality into the 1.2 version. In the meantime, the current distribution is marked as alpha and you may find that some functionality documented in this manual is not available or not working properly. Please bear with us in the meantime. Sorry for any inconvenience.