2,413 research outputs found
Automated Termination Analysis for Logic Programs with Cut
Termination is an important and well-studied property for logic programs.
However, almost all approaches for automated termination analysis focus on
definite logic programs, whereas real-world Prolog programs typically use the
cut operator. We introduce a novel pre-processing method which automatically
transforms Prolog programs into logic programs without cuts, where termination
of the cut-free program implies termination of the original program. Hence
after this pre-processing, any technique for proving termination of definite
logic programs can be applied. We implemented this pre-processing in our
termination prover AProVE and evaluated it successfully with extensive
experiments
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
Logic + control: An example
We present a Prolog program - the SAT solver of Howe and King - as a (pure) logic program with added control. The control consists of a selection rule (delays of Prolog) and pruning the search space. We construct the logic program together with proofs of its correctness and completeness, with respect to a formal specification. Correctness and termination of the logic program are inherited by the Prolog program; the change of selection rule preserves completeness. We prove
that completeness is also preserved by one case of pruning; for the other an informal justification is presented.
For proving correctness we use a method, which should be well known but is often neglected. For proving program completeness we employ a new, simpler variant of a method published previously. We point out usefulness of approximate specifications. We argue that the proof
methods correspond to natural declarative thinking about programs, and that they can be used, formally or informally, in every-day programming
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
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
Non-termination Analysis of Logic Programs with Integer arithmetics
In the past years, analyzers have been introduced to detect classes of
non-terminating queries for definite logic programs. Although these
non-termination analyzers have shown to be rather precise, their applicability
on real-life Prolog programs is limited because most Prolog programs use
non-logical features. As a first step towards the analysis of Prolog programs,
this paper presents a non-termination condition for Logic Programs containing
integer arithmetics. The analyzer is based on our non-termination analyzer
presented at ICLP 2009. The analysis starts from a class of queries and infers
a subclass of non-terminating ones. In a first phase, we ignore the outcome
(success or failure) of the arithmetic operations, assuming success of all
arithmetic calls. In a second phase, we characterize successful arithmetic
calls as a constraint problem, the solution of which determines the
non-terminating queries.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, journal TPLP (special issue on the international
conference of logic programming
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