Methods and rules

Abstract

We show how classical datalog semantics can be used directly and very simply to provide semantics to a syntactic extension of datalog with methods, classes, inheritance, overloading and late binding. Several approaches to resolution are considered, implemented in the model, and formally compared. They range from resolution in C ++ style to original kinds of resolution suggested by the declarative nature of the language. We show connections to view specification and a further extension allowing runtime derivation of the class hierarchy.