7 research outputs found
Inference of termination conditions for numerical loops
We present a new approach to termination analysis of numerical computations
in logic programs. Traditional approaches fail to analyse them due to non
well-foundedness of the integers. We present a technique that allows to
overcome these difficulties. Our approach is based on transforming a program in
way that allows integrating and extending techniques originally developed for
analysis of numerical computations in the framework of query-mapping pairs with
the well-known framework of acceptability. Such an integration not only
contributes to the understanding of termination behaviour of numerical
computations, but also allows to perform a correct analysis of such
computations automatically, thus, extending previous work on a
constraints-based approach to termination. In the last section of the paper we
discuss possible extensions of the technique, including incorporating general
term orderings.Comment: Presented at WST200
Acceptability with general orderings
We present a new approach to termination analysis of logic programs. The
essence of the approach is that we make use of general orderings (instead of
level mappings), like it is done in transformational approaches to logic
program termination analysis, but we apply these orderings directly to the
logic program and not to the term-rewrite system obtained through some
transformation. We define some variants of acceptability, based on general
orderings, and show how they are equivalent to LD-termination. We develop a
demand driven, constraint-based approach to verify these
acceptability-variants.
The advantage of the approach over standard acceptability is that in some
cases, where complex level mappings are needed, fairly simple orderings may be
easily generated. The advantage over transformational approaches is that it
avoids the transformation step all together.
{\bf Keywords:} termination analysis, acceptability, orderings.Comment: To appear in "Computational Logic: From Logic Programming into the
Future
Inference of termination conditions for numerical loops in Prolog
We present a new approach to termination analysis of numerical computations
in logic programs. Traditional approaches fail to analyse them due to non
well-foundedness of the integers. We present a technique that allows overcoming
these difficulties. Our approach is based on transforming a program in a way
that allows integrating and extending techniques originally developed for
analysis of numerical computations in the framework of query-mapping pairs with
the well-known framework of acceptability. Such an integration not only
contributes to the understanding of termination behaviour of numerical
computations, but also allows us to perform a correct analysis of such
computations automatically, by extending previous work on a constraint-based
approach to termination. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of the
technique, including incorporating general term orderings.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. To appear in
Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin
Classes of Terminating Logic Programs
Termination of logic programs depends critically on the selection rule, i.e.
the rule that determines which atom is selected in each resolution step. In
this article, we classify programs (and queries) according to the selection
rules for which they terminate. This is a survey and unified view on different
approaches in the literature. For each class, we present a sufficient, for most
classes even necessary, criterion for determining that a program is in that
class. We study six classes: a program strongly terminates if it terminates for
all selection rules; a program input terminates if it terminates for selection
rules which only select atoms that are sufficiently instantiated in their input
positions, so that these arguments do not get instantiated any further by the
unification; a program local delay terminates if it terminates for local
selection rules which only select atoms that are bounded w.r.t. an appropriate
level mapping; a program left-terminates if it terminates for the usual
left-to-right selection rule; a program exists-terminates if there exists a
selection rule for which it terminates; finally, a program has bounded
nondeterminism if it only has finitely many refutations. We propose a
semantics-preserving transformation from programs with bounded nondeterminism
into strongly terminating programs. Moreover, by unifying different formalisms
and making appropriate assumptions, we are able to establish a formal hierarchy
between the different classes.Comment: 50 pages. The following mistake was corrected: In figure 5, the first
clause for insert was insert([],X,[X]