Related papers: Proving completeness of logic programs with the cu…
Program correctness (in imperative and functional programming) splits in logic programming into correctness and completeness. Completeness means that a program produces all the answers required by its specification. Little work has been…
We discuss proving correctness and completeness of definite clause logic programs. We propose a method for proving completeness, while for proving correctness we employ a method which should be well known but is often neglected. Also, we…
This paper presents an example of formal reasoning about the semantics of a Prolog program of practical importance (the SAT solver of Howe and King). The program is treated as a definite clause logic program with added control. The logic…
Termination is an important and well-studied property for logic programs. However, almost all approaches for automated termination analysis focus on definite logic programs, whereas real-world Prolog programs typically use the cut operator.…
Partial correctness of imperative or functional programming divides in logic programming into two notions. Correctness means that all answers of the program are compatible with the specification. Completeness means that the program produces…
We advocate a declarative approach to proving properties of logic programs. Total correctness can be separated into correctness, completeness and clean termination; the latter includes non-floundering. Only clean termination depends on the…
As real logic programmers normally use cut (!), an effective learning procedure for logic programs should be able to deal with it. Because the cut predicate has only a procedural meaning, clauses containing cut cannot be learned using an…
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…
The semantics of the Prolog ``cut'' construct is explored in the context of some desirable properties of logic programming systems, referred to as the witness properties. The witness properties concern the operational consistency of…
It is well known that the resolution method (for propositional logic) is complete. However, completeness proofs found in the literature use an argument by contradiction showing that if a set of clauses is unsatisfiable, then it must have a…
A logic program is an executable specification. For example, merge sort in pure Prolog is a logical formula, yet shows creditable performance on long linked lists. But such executable specifications are a compromise: the logic is distorted…
Logic languages based on the theory of rational, possibly infinite, trees have much appeal in that rational trees allow for faster unification (due to the safe omission of the occurs-check) and increased expressivity (cyclic terms can…
Slicing is a program analysis technique originally developed for imperative languages. It facilitates understanding of data flow and debugging. This paper discusses slicing of Constraint Logic Programs. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is…
Program slicing has been mainly studied in the context of imperative languages, where it has been applied to a wide variety of software engineering tasks, like program understanding, maintenance, debugging, testing, code reuse, etc. This…
This paper presents a Prolog interface to the MiniSat satisfiability solver. Logic program- ming with satisfiability combines the strengths of the two paradigms: logic programming for encoding search problems into satisfiability on the one…
Thom Fr\"uhwirth presented a short, elegant and efficient Prolog program for the n queens problem. However the program may be seen as rather tricky and one may not be convinced about its correctness. This paper explains the program in a…
This paper describes a general framework for automatic termination analysis of logic programs, where we understand by ``termination'' the finitenes s of the LD-tree constructed for the program and a given query. A general property of…
Logic can be made useful for programming and for databases independently of logic programming. To be useful in this way, logic has to provide a mechanism for the definition of new functions and new relations on the basis of those given in…
There are many different semantics for general logic programs (i.e. programs that use negation in the bodies of clauses). Most of these semantics are Turing complete (in a sense that can be made precise), implying that they are undecidable.…
Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under…