The List Introduction Strategy for the Derivation of Logic Programs

We present a new program transformation strategy based on the introduction of lists. This strategy is an extension of the tupling strategy which is based on the introduction of tuples of fixed length. The list introduction strategy overcomes some of the limitations of the tupling strategy and, in particular, it makes it possible to transform general recursive programs into linear recursive ones also in cases when this transformation cannot be performed by the tupling strategy. The linear recursive programs we derive by applying the list introduction strategy have in most cases very good time and space performance because they avoid repeated evaluations of goals and unnecessary constructions of data structures.