---
title: "Tabling as a Library with Delimited Control"
authors:
  - "Benoit Desouter"
  - "Marko van Dooren"
  - "Tom Schrijvers"
  - "Alexander Vandenbroucke"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/619"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0619.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "4145-4148"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Tabling as a Library with Delimited Control

Benoit Desouter, Marko van Dooren, Tom Schrijvers, Alexander Vandenbroucke

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 4145-4148.

## Abstract

The logic programming language Prolog uses a resource-efficient SLD resolution strategy for query answering. Yet, its propensity for nontermination seriously detracts from the language's declarative nature. This problem is remedied by tabling, a modified execution strategy that allows a larger class of programs to terminate. Unfortunately, few Prolog systems provide tabling, because the documented implementation techniques are complex, low-level and require a prohibitive engineering effort. To enable more widespread adoption, this paper presents a novel implementation of tabling for Prolog that is both high-level and compact. It comes in the form of a Prolog library that weighs in at under 600 lines of code, is based on delimited control and delivers reasonable performance.