Fair Derivations in Logic Programming: Operational and Greatest Fixpoint Semantics

Using topological methods, we study the operational and greatest fixpoint semantics of infinite computations in logic programming. We show the equivalence of the operational and greatest fix point semantics in the case of fair derivations. We give some canonical partition, and soundness and completeness results which generalize already known results about the finitary case. Since fair derivations are a generalization of successful derivations, we thus give a uniform treatment of all meaningful computations in logic programming.