Complexity and expressive power of logic programming

Abstract

This paper surveys various complexity results on different forms of logic programming. The main focus is on decidable forms of logic programming, in particular propositional logic programming and datalog, but we also mention general logic programming with function symbols. Next to classical results on plain logic programming (pure Horn clause programs), more recent results on various important extensions of logic programming are surveyed. These include logic programming with different forms of negation, disjunctive logic programming, logic programming with equality, and constraint logic programming. The complexity of the unification problem is also addressed.