A.35.1.1 About the tabling implementation

The SWI-Prolog implementation uses Delimited continuations (see section 4.10 to realise suspension of variant calls. The initial version was written by Benoit Desouter and described in Desouter et al., 2015. We moved the main data structures required for tabling, the answer tables (see section 4.14.4) and the worklist to SWI-Prolog's C core. Mode directed tabling (section A.35.3) is based on a prototype implementation by Fabrizio Riguzzi.

The table/1 directive causes the creation of a wrapper calling the renamed original predicate. For example, the program in section A.35.2 is translated into the following program. We give this information to improve your understanding of the current tabling implementation. Future versions are likely to use a more low-level translation that is not based on wrappers.

connection(A, B) :-
        start_tabling(user:connection(A, B),
                      'connection tabled'(A, B)).

'connection tabled'(X, Y) :-
        connection(X, Z),
        connection(Z, Y).
'connection tabled'(X, Y) :-
        connection(Y, X).

'connection tabled'('Amsterdam', 'Schiphol').
'connection tabled'('Amsterdam', 'Haarlem').
'connection tabled'('Schiphol', 'Leiden').
'connection tabled'('Haarlem', 'Leiden').