Related papers: On systematic construction of correct logic progra…
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…
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 describes a simpler way for programmers to reason about the correctness of their code. The study of semantics of logic programs has shown strong links between the model theoretic semantics (truth and falsity of atoms in the…
This paper treats logic programming with three kinds of negation: default, weak and strict negations. A 3-valued logic model theory is discussed for logic programs with three kinds of negation. The procedure is constructed for negations so…
Completeness of a logic program means that the program produces all the answers required by its specification. The cut is an important construct of programming language Prolog. It prunes part of the search space, this may result in a loss…
Types in logic programming have focused on conservative approximations of program semantics by regular types, on one hand, and on type systems based on a prescriptive semantics defined for typed programs, on the other. In this paper, we…
This paper analyses the declarative readings of logic programming. Logic programming - and negation as failure - has no unique declarative reading. One common view is that logic programming is a logic for default reasoning, a sub-formalism…
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…
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…
We study transformational program logics for correctness and incorrectness that we extend to explicitly handle both termination and nontermination. We show that the logics are abstract interpretations of the right image transformer for a…
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.…
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…
We present a method for verifying partial correctness properties of imperative programs that manipulate integers and arrays by using techniques based on the transformation of constraint logic programs (CLP). We use CLP as a metalanguage for…
Answer set programming is a prominent declarative programming paradigm used in formulating combinatorial search problems and implementing different knowledge representation formalisms. Frequently, several related and yet substantially…
In [Hitzler and Wendt 2002, 2005], a new methodology has been proposed which allows to derive uniform characterizations of different declarative semantics for logic programs with negation. One result from this work is that the well-founded…
Unintended failures during a computation are painful but frequent during software development. Failures due to external reasons (e.g., missing files, no permissions) can be caught by exception handlers. Programming failures, such as calling…
Runtime efficiency and termination are crucial properties in the studies of program verification. Instead of dealing with these issues in an ad hoc manner, it would be useful to develop a robust framework in which such properties are…
We provide a sound and complete proof system for an extension of Kleene's ternary logic to predicates. The concept of theory is extended with, for each function symbol, a formula that specifies when the function is defined. The notion of…
In this note, we use Kunen's notion of a signing to establish two theorems about the well-founded semantics of logic programs, in the case where we are interested in only (say) the positive literals of a predicate $p$ that are consequences…