CoLoR: a Coq library on well-founded rewrite relations and its application to the automated verification of termination certificates

Termination is an important property of programs; notably required for programs formulated in proof assistants. It is a very active subject of research in the Turing-complete formalism of term rewriting systems, where many methods and tools have been developed over the years to address this problem. Ensuring reliability of those tools is therefore an important issue. In this paper we present a library formalizing important results of the theory of well-founded (rewrite) relations in the proof assistant Coq. We also present its application to the automated verification of termination certificates, as produced by termination tools

On the Termination Problem for Probabilistic Higher-Order Recursive Programs

In the last two decades, there has been much progress on model checking of both probabilistic systems and higher-order programs. In spite of the emergence of higher-order probabilistic programming languages, not much has been done to combine those two approaches. In this paper, we initiate a study on the probabilistic higher-order model checking problem, by giving some first theoretical and experimental results. As a first step towards our goal, we introduce PHORS, a probabilistic extension of higher-order recursion schemes (HORS), as a model of probabilistic higher-order programs. The model of PHORS may alternatively be viewed as a higher-order extension of recursive Markov chains. We then investigate the probabilistic termination problem -- or, equivalently, the probabilistic reachability problem. We prove that almost sure termination of order-2 PHORS is undecidable. We also provide a fixpoint characterization of the termination probability of PHORS, and develop a sound (but possibly incomplete) procedure for approximately computing the termination probability. We have implemented the procedure for order-2 PHORSs, and confirmed that the procedure works well through preliminary experiments that are reported at the end of the article

Size-Change Termination as a Contract

Termination is an important but undecidable program property, which has led to a large body of work on static methods for conservatively predicting or enforcing termination. One such method is the size-change termination approach of Lee, Jones, and Ben-Amram, which operates in two phases: (1) abstract programs into "size-change graphs," and (2) check these graphs for the size-change property: the existence of paths that lead to infinite decreasing sequences. We transpose these two phases with an operational semantics that accounts for the run-time enforcement of the size-change property, postponing (or entirely avoiding) program abstraction. This choice has two key consequences: (1) size-change termination can be checked at run-time and (2) termination can be rephrased as a safety property analyzed using existing methods for systematic abstraction. We formulate run-time size-change checks as contracts in the style of Findler and Felleisen. The result compliments existing contracts that enforce partial correctness specifications to obtain contracts for total correctness. Our approach combines the robustness of the size-change principle for termination with the precise information available at run-time. It has tunable overhead and can check for nontermination without the conservativeness necessary in static checking. To obtain a sound and computable termination analysis, we apply existing abstract interpretation techniques directly to the operational semantics, avoiding the need for custom abstractions for termination. The resulting analyzer is competitive with with existing, purpose-built analyzers

Type-Based Termination, Inflationary Fixed-Points, and Mixed Inductive-Coinductive Types

Type systems certify program properties in a compositional way. From a bigger program one can abstract out a part and certify the properties of the resulting abstract program by just using the type of the part that was abstracted away. Termination and productivity are non-trivial yet desired program properties, and several type systems have been put forward that guarantee termination, compositionally. These type systems are intimately connected to the definition of least and greatest fixed-points by ordinal iteration. While most type systems use conventional iteration, we consider inflationary iteration in this article. We demonstrate how this leads to a more principled type system, with recursion based on well-founded induction. The type system has a prototypical implementation, MiniAgda, and we show in particular how it certifies productivity of corecursive and mixed recursive-corecursive functions.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2012, arXiv:1202.317

Termination Casts: A Flexible Approach to Termination with General Recursion

This paper proposes a type-and-effect system called Teqt, which distinguishes terminating terms and total functions from possibly diverging terms and partial functions, for a lambda calculus with general recursion and equality types. The central idea is to include a primitive type-form "Terminates t", expressing that term t is terminating; and then allow terms t to be coerced from possibly diverging to total, using a proof of Terminates t. We call such coercions termination casts, and show how to implement terminating recursion using them. For the meta-theory of the system, we describe a translation from Teqt to a logical theory of termination for general recursive, simply typed functions. Every typing judgment of Teqt is translated to a theorem expressing the appropriate termination property of the computational part of the Teqt term.Comment: In Proceedings PAR 2010, arXiv:1012.455

12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012) : WST 2012, February 19–23, 2012, Obergurgl, Austria / ed. by Georg Moser

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012), to be held February 19–23, 2012 in Obergurgl, Austria. The goal of the Workshop on Termination is to be a venue for presentation and discussion of all topics in and around termination. In this way, the workshop tries to bridge the gaps between different communities interested and active in research in and around termination. The 12th International Workshop on Termination in Obergurgl continues the successful workshops held in St. Andrews (1993), La Bresse (1995), Ede (1997), Dagstuhl (1999), Utrecht (2001), Valencia (2003), Aachen (2004), Seattle (2006), Paris (2007), Leipzig (2009), and Edinburgh (2010). The 12th International Workshop on Termination did welcome contributions on all aspects of termination and complexity analysis. Contributions from the imperative, constraint, functional, and logic programming communities, and papers investigating applications of complexity or termination (for example in program transformation or theorem proving) were particularly welcome. We did receive 18 submissions which all were accepted. Each paper was assigned two reviewers. In addition to these 18 contributed talks, WST 2012, hosts three invited talks by Alexander Krauss, Martin Hofmann, and Fausto Spoto

Verifying Temporal Properties of Reactive Systems by Transformation

We show how program transformation techniques can be used for the verification of both safety and liveness properties of reactive systems. In particular, we show how the program transformation technique distillation can be used to transform reactive systems specified in a functional language into a simplified form that can subsequently be analysed to verify temporal properties of the systems. Example systems which are intended to model mutual exclusion are analysed using these techniques with respect to both safety (mutual exclusion) and liveness (non-starvation), with the errors they contain being correctly identified.Comment: In Proceedings VPT 2015, arXiv:1512.02215. This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 10/CE/I1855 to Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (www.lero.ie), and by the School of Computing, Dublin City Universit