Related papers: Checking Termination of Bottom-Up Evaluation of Lo…

The idea of using unfolding as a way of computing a program semantics has been applied successfully to logic programs and has shown itself a powerful tool that provides concrete, implementable results, as its outcome is actually source…

Automated analysis of recursive derivations in logic programming is known to be a hard problem. Both termination and non-termination are undecidable problems in Turing-complete languages. However, some declarative languages offer a…

Size-Change Termination is an increasingly-popular technique for verifying program termination. These termination proofs are deduced from an abstract representation of the program in the form of "size-change graphs". We present algorithms…

Proof search has been used to specify a wide range of computation systems. In order to build a framework for reasoning about such specifications, we make use of a sequent calculus involving induction and co-induction. These proof principles…

We present a new approach to termination analysis of logic programs. The essence of the approach is that we make use of general term-orderings (instead of level mappings), like it is done in transformational approaches to logic program…

Education in the practical applications of logic and proving such as the formal specification and verification of computer programs is substantially hampered by the fact that most time and effort that is invested in proving is actually…

Part of the theory of logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning concerns the study of fixed-point semantics for these paradigms. Several different semantics have been proposed during the last two decades, and some have been more…

Every definite logic program has as its meaning a least Herbrand model with respect to the program-independent ordering "set-inclusion". In the case of normal logic programs there do not exist least models in general. However, according to…

Bounded model checking of pointer programs is a debugging technique for programs that manipulate dynamically allocated pointer structures on the heap. It is based on the following four observations. First, error conditions like dereference…

`What more than its truth do we know if we have a proof of a theorem in a given formal system?' We examine Kreisel's question in the particular context of program termination proofs, with an eye to deriving complexity bounds on program…

In this paper, we identify a fragment of second-order logic with restricted quantification that is expressive enough to capture numerous static analysis problems (e.g. safety proving, bug finding, termination and non-termination proving,…

We introduce a simple functional language foetus (lambda calculus with tuples, constructors and pattern matching) supplied with a termination checker. This checker tries to find a well-founded structural order on the parameters on the given…

In this paper we study the complexity of the problems: given a loop, described by linear constraints over a finite set of variables, is there a linear or lexicographical-linear ranking function for this loop? While existence of such…

The problem of determining whether or not any program terminates was shown to be undecidable by Turing, but recent advances in the area have allowed this information to be determined for a large class of programs. The classic method for…

There are many techniques and tools to prove termination of C programs, but up to now these tools were not very powerful for fully automated termination proofs of programs whose termination depends on recursive data structures like lists.…

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence…

Program logics typically reason about an over-approximation of program behaviour to prove the absence of bugs. Recently, program logics have been proposed that instead prove the presence of bugs by means of under-approximate reasoning,…

In this note, we provide complexity characterizations of model checking multi-pushdown systems. Multi-pushdown systems model recursive concurrent programs in which any sequential process has a finite control. We consider three standard…

Model checking properties are often described by means of finite automata. Any particular such automaton divides the set of infinite trees into finitely many classes, according to which state has an infinite run. Building the full type…

We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…