A simple polynomial groundness analysis for logic programs

Heaton, Andrew; Abo-Zaed, Muhamed; Codish, Michael; King, Andy

doi:10.1016/s0743-1066(00)00006-6

Cited by 11 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…(The subtlety of reasoning about builtins is not confined to backwards analysis. In fact correctly and precisely encoding the behaviour of the builtins is often the most difficult part of any analysis [33,36]. )…”

Section: Backwards Mode Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing Logic Programs by Reasoning Backwards

Howe¹,

King

2004

Program Development in Computational Logic

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Abstract. One recent advance in program development has been the application of abstract interpretation to verify the partial correctness of a (constraint) logic program. Traditionally forwards analysis has been applied that starts with an initial goal and traces the execution in the direction of the control-flow to approximate the program state at each program point. This is often enough to verify assertions that a property holds. The dual approach is to apply backwards analysis to propagate properties of the allowable states against the control-flow to infer queries for which the program will not violate any assertion. Backwards analysis also underpins other program development tasks such as verifying the termination of a logic program or proving that a logic program with a delay mechanism cannot reduce to a state that contains sub-goals which suspend indefinitely. This paper reviews various backwards analyses that have been proposed for logic programs, identifying common threads in these techniques. The analyses are explained through a series of worked examples. The paper concludes with some suggestions for research in backwards analysis for logic program development.

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Section: Backwards Mode Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing Logic Programs by Reasoning Backwards

Howe¹,

King

2004

Program Development in Computational Logic

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“…EPos loses precision in several programs, but still performs reasonably well. (Goal-independent analysis precision comparisons for EPos and Def are given in (Heaton et al, 2000) and ). These show that EPos loses significant precision, whereas Def gives precision close to that of Pos.…”

Section: Domains: Timings and Precisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pos is more expressive than Def , but studies have shown that Def analysers can be faster than comparable Pos analysers (Armstrong et al, 1998) and, in practice, the loss of precision for goal-dependent groundness analysis is usually small (Heaton et al, 2000). This paper is a development of (Howe & King, 2000) and is an exploration of the representation of Boolean functions for groundness analysis and the use of Prolog as a medium for implementing all the components of a groundness analyser.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient groundness analysis in Prolog

Howe

King

2002

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

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Boolean functions can be used to express the groundness of, and trace grounding dependencies between, program variables in (constraint) logic programs. In this paper, a variety of issues pertaining to the efficient Prolog implementation of groundness analysis are investigated, focusing on the domain of definite Boolean functions, Def . The systematic design of the representation of an abstract domain is discussed in relation to its impact on the algorithmic complexity of the domain operations; the most frequently called operations should be the most lightweight. This methodology is applied to Def , resulting in a new representation, together with new algorithms for its domain operations utilising previously unexploited properties of Def -for instance, quadratic-time entailment checking. The iteration strategy driving the analysis is also discussed and a simple, but very effective, optimisation of induced magic is described. The analysis can be implemented straightforwardly in Prolog and the use of a non-ground representation results in an efficient, scalable tool which does not require widening to be invoked, even on the largest benchmarks. An extensive experimental evaluation is given.

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“…However, Pos-based analyzers do not come with any efficiency guarantee as they require in the worst case exponential number of iterations or exponentially large data structures [11]. More abstract domains [21,23] have been proposed, offering different trade-offs between the precision and the efficiency of analysis.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Con is the least precise abstract domain for groundness analysis. The parametric groundness analysis is thus less precise than a groundness analysis that uses a more precise abstract domain namely Pos [32], Def [21] or EPos [23]. However, a Con-based groundness analysis is much more efficient than groundness analyzers based on more precise abstract domains.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parameterizing a Groundness Analysis of Logic Programs

2001

Static Analysis

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Abstract. We present a parametric groundness analysis whose input and output are parameterized by a set of groundness parameters. The result of the analysis can be instantiated for different uses of the program. It can also be used to derive sufficient conditions for safely removing groundness checks for built-in calls in the program. The parametric groundness analysis is obtained by generalizing a non-parametric groundness analysis that uses the abstract domain Con. It is shown to be as precise as the non-parametric groundness analysis for any possible values for the groundness parameters. Experimental results of a prototype implementation of the parametric groundness analysis are given.

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A simple polynomial groundness analysis for logic programs

Abstract: The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.

Cited by 11 publications

References 17 publications

Analysing Logic Programs by Reasoning Backwards

Analysing Logic Programs by Reasoning Backwards

Efficient groundness analysis in Prolog

Parameterizing a Groundness Analysis of Logic Programs

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