SelfLog: Language and Implementation

We discuss a modular extension to logic programming with built-in mechanisms for inheritance and message passing. The definition of inheritance we consider encompasses the two mechanisms known in the literature as static and dynamic inheritance. The significance of this extension has been addressed in the recent literature. In this paper the emphasis is primarily on the implementation. We describe an extension of the WAM which supports these new mechanisms, and we outline the current implementation together with some optimizations. We then compare our system with an alternative implementation which translates to Prolog and discuss the results.