13,916 research outputs found
Generating Efficient, Terminating Logic Programs
The objective of control generation in logic programming is to automatically derive a computation rule for a program that is efficient and yet does not compromise program correctness. Progress in solving this important problem has been slow and, to date, only partial solutions have been proposed where the generated programs are either incorrect or inefficient. We show how the control generation problem can be tackled with a simple automatic transformation that relies on information about the depths of derivations. To prove correctness of our transform we introduce the notion of a semi delay recurrent program which generalises previous ideas in the termination literature for reasoning about logic programs with dynamic selection rules
Program logics for homogeneous meta-programming.
A meta-program is a program that generates or manipulates another program; in homogeneous meta-programming, a program may generate new parts of, or manipulate, itself. Meta-programming has been used extensively since macros
were introduced to Lisp, yet we have little idea how formally to reason about metaprograms. This paper provides the first program logics for homogeneous metaprogramming
– using a variant of MiniMLe by Davies and Pfenning as underlying meta-programming language.We show the applicability of our approach by reasoning about example meta-programs from the literature. We also demonstrate that our logics are relatively complete in the sense of Cook, enable the inductive derivation of characteristic formulae, and exactly capture the observational properties induced by the operational semantics
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]
Proof Relevant Corecursive Resolution
Resolution lies at the foundation of both logic programming and type class
context reduction in functional languages. Terminating derivations by
resolution have well-defined inductive meaning, whereas some non-terminating
derivations can be understood coinductively. Cycle detection is a popular
method to capture a small subset of such derivations. We show that in fact
cycle detection is a restricted form of coinductive proof, in which the atomic
formula forming the cycle plays the role of coinductive hypothesis.
This paper introduces a heuristic method for obtaining richer coinductive
hypotheses in the form of Horn formulas. Our approach subsumes cycle detection
and gives coinductive meaning to a larger class of derivations. For this
purpose we extend resolution with Horn formula resolvents and corecursive
evidence generation. We illustrate our method on non-terminating type class
resolution problems.Comment: 23 pages, with appendices in FLOPS 201
Automatic generation of simplified weakest preconditions for integrity constraint verification
Given a constraint assumed to hold on a database and an update to
be performed on , we address the following question: will still hold
after is performed? When is a relational database, we define a
confluent terminating rewriting system which, starting from and ,
automatically derives a simplified weakest precondition such that,
whenever satisfies , then the updated database will satisfy
, and moreover is simplified in the sense that its computation
depends only upon the instances of that may be modified by the update. We
then extend the definition of a simplified to the case of deductive
databases; we prove it using fixpoint induction
- …