Tabled logic programming is receiving increasing attention in the Logic
Programming community. It avoids many of the shortcomings of SLD execution and
provides a more flexible and often extremely efficient execution mechanism for
logic programs. In particular, tabled execution of logic programs terminates
more often than execution based on SLD-resolution. In this article, we
introduce two notions of universal termination of logic programming with
Tabling: quasi-termination and (the stronger notion of) LG-termination. We
present sufficient conditions for these two notions of termination, namely
quasi-acceptability and LG-acceptability, and we show that these conditions are
also necessary in case the tabling is well-chosen. Starting from these
conditions, we give modular termination proofs, i.e., proofs capable of
combining termination proofs of separate programs to obtain termination proofs
of combined programs. Finally, in the presence of mode information, we state
sufficient conditions which form the basis for automatically proving
termination in a constraint-based way.Comment: 48 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ACM Transactions on Computational
Logic (TOCL
