A non-termination criterion for binary constraint logic programs

Abstract

Note: this paper has been accepted for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). AbstractOn the one hand, termination analysis of logic programs is now a fairly established research topic within the logic programming community. On the other hand, non-termination analysis seems to remain a much less attractive subject. If we divide this line of research into two kinds of approaches: dynamic versus static analysis, this paper belongs to the latter. It proposes a criterion for detecting non-terminating atomic queries with respect to binary CLP rules, which strictly generalizes our previous works on this subject. We give a generic operational definition and an implemented logical form of this criterion. Then we show that the logical form is correct and complete with respect to the operational definition.

Proving Nontermination via Safety

“…[24,31]). Most related to our setting are techniques for constraint-logic programs (CLPs) [25]. Termination tools for CLPs (e.g.…”

“…Termination tools for CLPs (e.g. [25]) can in cases be used to prove nontermination of imperative programs (e.g. Julia [26] can show nontermination for Java Bytecode programs if the abstraction to CLPs is exact, but gives no witness like a recurrence set to the user).…”

Why Can’t You Behave? Non-termination Analysis of Direct Recursive Rules with Constraints

“…Related Work. Non-termination analysis has been considered for term rewriting systems [12,3], logic programming languages [15,11,13,6], and imperative languages [9,2,14,10].…”

“…However, there is also a difference to our approach: mode information about the arguments is essential in analysing logic programs. A similar type of information is also needed for non-termination of constraint logic programs [13]. It gives raise to so-called filters for abstracting states of the computation.…”

Disproving termination with overapproximation

“…[30]) can in cases be used to prove nontermination of imperative programs (e.g. JULIA [31] can show nontermination for Java bytecode programs if the abstraction to constraintlogic programs is exact, but provides no witness like a recurrence set to the user).…”