This refactoring separates predicates from their declarations. The
purpose of this is to avoid duplicating properties specific to the
predicate declaration and not its occurrences in the program.
This adds support for declaring predicates as placeholders through the
“#external” directive in the input language of clingo.
Placeholders are not subject to completion. This prevents predicates
that represent instance-specific facts from being assumed as universally
false by default negation when translating an encoding.
This stretches clingo’s usual syntax a bit to make the implementation
lightweight. In order to declare a predicate with a specific arity as a
placeholder, the following statement needs to be added to the program:
#external <predicate name>(<arity>).
Multiple unit tests cover cases where placeholders are used or not as
well as a more complex graph coloring example.
Patrick Lühne