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]

Acceptable Programs Revisited

Acceptable logic programs have been studied extensively in the context of proving termination of Prolog programs. It is difficult, however, to establish acceptability from the definition since this depends on finding a suitable model, which need not be a Herbrand model in general, together with a suitable level mapping that one can use to check the conditions which characterize acceptability. In this paper, we will see that when working over a fixed but arbitrary preinterpretation, a method can be provided for obtaining both a suitable model and a canonical level mapping which are sufficient for this purpose. Furthermore, the canonical model and level mapping obtained will turn out to be sufficient for discussing termination of non-ground queries. 1 Introduction Acceptable programs were first studied in detail in [AP93] where they were shown to coincide, if floundering is ignored, with the programs which are left-terminating. They have been much examined in the literature, fo..