Efficient Compression of Prolog Programs

Abstract

We propose a special-purpose class of compression algorithms for efficient compression of Prolog programs. It is a dictionary-based compression method, specially designed for the compression of Prolog code, and therefore we name it PCA (Prolog Compression Algorithm). According to the experimental results this method provides better compression than state-of-the-art general-purpose compression algorithms. Since the algorithm works with Prolog syntactic entities (e.g. atoms, terms, etc.) the implementation of a Prolog prototype is straightforward and very easy to use in any Prolog application that needs compression. Although the algorithm is designed for Prolog programs, the idea can be easily applied for the compression of programs written in other (logic) languages.