Practical Methods for Proving Termination of General Logic Programs

Termination of logic programs with negated body atoms (here called general logic programs) is an important topic. One reason is that many computational mechanisms used to process negated atoms, like Clark's negation as failure and Chan's constructive negation, are based on termination conditions. This paper introduces a methodology for proving termination of general logic programs w.r.t. the Prolog selection rule. The idea is to distinguish parts of the program depending on whether or not their termination depends on the selection rule. To this end, the notions of low-, weakly up-, and up-acceptable program are introduced. We use these notions to develop a methodology for proving termination of general logic programs, and show how interesting problems in non-monotonic reasoning can be formalized and implemented by means of terminating general logic programs.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Correctness and completeness of logic programs

We discuss proving correctness and completeness of definite clause logic programs. We propose a method for proving completeness, while for proving correctness we employ a method which should be well known but is often neglected. Also, we show how to prove completeness and correctness in the presence of SLD-tree pruning, and point out that approximate specifications simplify specifications and proofs. We compare the proof methods to declarative diagnosis (algorithmic debugging), showing that approximate specifications eliminate a major drawback of the latter. We argue that our proof methods reflect natural declarative thinking about programs, and that they can be used, formally or informally, in every-day programming.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figures; with editorial modifications, small corrections and extensions. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1411.3015. Overlaps explained in "Related Work" (p. 21

Automatic Synthesis of Logical Models for Order-Sorted First-Order Theories

[EN] In program analysis, the synthesis of models of logical theories representing the program semantics is often useful to prove program properties. We use order-sorted first- order logic as an appropriate framework to describe the semantics and properties of programs as given theories. Then we investigate the automatic synthesis of models for such theories. We use convex polytopic domains as a flexible approach to associate different domains to different sorts. We introduce a framework for the piecewise definition of functions and predicates. We develop its use with linear expressions (in a wide sense, including linear transformations represented as matrices) and inequalities to specify functions and predicates. In this way, algorithms and tools from linear algebra and arithmetic constraint solving (e.g., SMT) can be used as a backend for an efficient implementation.Partially supported by the EU (FEDER), projects TIN2015-69175-C4-1-R, and GV PROMETEOII/2015/ 013. R. Gutiérrez also supported by Juan de la Cierva Fellowship JCI-2012-13528.Lucas Alba, S.; Gutiérrez Gil, R. (2018). Automatic Synthesis of Logical Models for Order-Sorted First-Order Theories. Journal of Automated Reasoning. 60(4):465-501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-017-9419-3S465501604Alarcón, B., Gutiérrez, R., Lucas, S., Navarro-Marset, R.: Proving termination properties with MU-TERM. In: Proceedings of AMAST’10. LNCS, vol. 6486, pp. 201–208 (2011)Alarcón, B., Lucas, S., Navarro-Marset, R.: Using matrix interpretations over the reals in proofs of termination. In: Proceedings of PROLE’09, pp. 255–264 (2009)Albert, E., Genaim, S., Gutiérrez, R.: A Transformational Approach to Resource Analysis with Typed-Norms. Revised Selected Papers from LOPSTR’13. LNCS, vol. 8901, pp 38–53 (2013)de Angelis, E., Fioravante, F., Pettorossi, A., Proietti, M.: Proving correctness of imperative programs by linearizing constrained Horn clauses. Theory Pract. Log. 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Proving Correctness and Completeness of Normal Programs - a Declarative Approach

We advocate a declarative approach to proving properties of logic programs. Total correctness can be separated into correctness, completeness and clean termination; the latter includes non-floundering. Only clean termination depends on the operational semantics, in particular on the selection rule. We show how to deal with correctness and completeness in a declarative way, treating programs only from the logical point of view. Specifications used in this approach are interpretations (or theories). We point out that specifications for correctness may differ from those for completeness, as usually there are answers which are neither considered erroneous nor required to be computed. We present proof methods for correctness and completeness for definite programs and generalize them to normal programs. For normal programs we use the 3-valued completion semantics; this is a standard semantics corresponding to negation as finite failure. The proof methods employ solely the classical 2-valued logic. We use a 2-valued characterization of the 3-valued completion semantics which may be of separate interest. The presented methods are compared with an approach based on operational semantics. We also employ the ideas of this work to generalize a known method of proving termination of normal programs.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). 44 page

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