Pair-sharing over rational trees

Abstract

Sharing information is useful in specialising, optimising and parallelising logic programs and thus sharing analysis is an important topic of both abstract interpretation and logic programming. Sharing analyses infer which pairs of program variables can never be bound to terms that contain a common variable. We generalise a classic pair-sharing analysis from Herbrand unification to trace sharing over rational tree constraints. This is useful for reasoning about programs written in SICStus and Prolog-III because these languages use rational tree unification as the default equation solver.