Productive Corecursion in Logic Programming

Logic Programming is a Turing complete language. As a consequence, designing algorithms that decide termination and non-termination of programs or decide inductive/coinductive soundness of formulae is a challenging task. For example, the existing state-of-the-art algorithms can only semi-decide coinductive soundness of queries in logic programming for regular formulae. Another, less famous, but equally fundamental and important undecidable property is productivity. If a derivation is infinite and coinductively sound, we may ask whether the computed answer it determines actually computes an infinite formula. If it does, the infinite computation is productive. This intuition was first expressed under the name of computations at infinity in the 80s. In modern days of the Internet and stream processing, its importance lies in connection to infinite data structure processing. Recently, an algorithm was presented that semi-decides a weaker property -- of productivity of logic programs. A logic program is productive if it can give rise to productive derivations. In this paper we strengthen these recent results. We propose a method that semi-decides productivity of individual derivations for regular formulae. Thus we at last give an algorithmic counterpart to the notion of productivity of derivations in logic programming. This is the first algorithmic solution to the problem since it was raised more than 30 years ago. We also present an implementation of this algorithm.Comment: Paper presented at the 33nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2017), Melbourne, Australia, August 28 to September 1, 2017 16 pages, LaTeX, no figure

Exploiting parallelism in coalgebraic logic programming

We present a parallel implementation of Coalgebraic Logic Programming (CoALP) in the programming language Go. CoALP was initially introduced to reflect coalgebraic semantics of logic programming, with coalgebraic derivation algorithm featuring both corecursion and parallelism. Here, we discuss how the coalgebraic semantics influenced our parallel implementation of logic programming

Sound Regular Corecursion in coFJ

The aim of the paper is to provide solid foundations for a programming paradigm natively supporting the creation and manipulation of cyclic data structures. To this end, we describe coFJ, a Java-like calculus where objects can be infinite and methods are equipped with a codefinition (an alternative body). We provide an abstract semantics of the calculus based on the framework of inference systems with corules. In coFJ with this semantics, FJ recursive methods on finite objects can be extended to infinite objects as well, and behave as desired by the programmer, by specifying a codefinition. We also describe an operational semantics which can be directly implemented in a programming language, and prove the soundness of such semantics with respect to the abstract one

Corecursive featherweight Java revisited

We describe a Java-like calculus which supports cyclic data structures, and offers a mechanism of flexible regular corecursion for their manipulation. The calculus enhances an earlier proposal by a more sophisticated reduction semantics, which filters out, by an additional check, some spurious results which were obtained in the previous model

Enhancing Expressivity of Checked Corecursive Streams

We propose a novel approach to stream definition and manipulation. Our solution is based on two key ideas. Regular corecursion, which avoids non termination by detecting cyclic calls, is enhanced, by allowing in equations defining streams other operators besides the stream constructor. In this way, some non-regular streams are definable. Furthermore, execution includes a runtime check to ensure that the stream generated by a function call is well-defined, in the sense that access to an arbitrary index always succeeds. We extend the technique beyond the simple stream operators considered in previous work, notably by adding an interleaving combinator which has a non-trivial recursion scheme

Structural Resolution with Co-inductive Loop Detection

A way to combine co-SLD style loop detection with structural resolution was found and is introduced in this work, to extend structural resolution with co-induction. In particular, we present the operational semantics, called co-inductive structural resolution, of this novel combination and prove its soundness with respect to the greatest complete Herbrand model.Comment: In Proceedings CoALP-Ty'16, arXiv:1709.0419

Enhancing Regular Corecursion

Nowadays, data structures which are conceptually infinite, such as streams or infinite trees, are very common in computer science. When it comes to their manipulation, one major problem to face is how to finitely represent and deal with them without incurring in non-terminating behaviours. Regular corecursion is a solution relying on finite representation of regular data structures, and detection of cyclic calls. The topics in the thesis revolve around two enhancements of regular corecursion in different directions. In the first part, we present Corecursive Featherweight Java (coFJ), an object-oriented calculus which supports flexible regular corecursion, that is, allows the programmer to specify the behaviour when a cyclic call is found. In the second part, instead, we extend regular corecursion beyond regular terms, focusing on the significant case of stream definitions