AProVE: A system for proving termination (original) (raw)

Orderings and Constraints: Theory and Practice of Proving Termination

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

In contrast to the current general way of developing tools for proving termination automatically, this paper intends to show an alternative program based on using on the one hand the theory of term orderings to develop powerful and widely applicable methods and on the other hand constraint based techniques to put them in practice. In order to show that this program is realizable a constraint-based framework is presented where ordering based methods for term rewriting, including extensions like Associative-Commutative rewriting, Context-Sensitive rewriting or Higher-Order rewriting, as well as the use of rewriting strategies, can be put in practice in a natural way.

mu-term: A Tool for Proving Termination of Context-Sensitive Rewriting

Rewriting Techniques and Applications, 2004

Restrictions of rewriting can eventually achieve termination by pruning all infinite rewrite sequences issued from every term. Contextsensitive rewriting (CSR) is an example of such a restriction. In CSR, the replacements in some arguments of the function symbols are permanently forbidden. This paper describes mu-term, a tool which can be used to automatically prove termination of CSR. The tool implements the generation of the appropriate orderings for proving termination of CSR by means of polynomial interpretations over the rational numbers. In fact, mu-term is the first termination tool which generates term orderings based on such polynomial interpretations. These orderings can also be used, in a number of different ways, for proving termination of ordinary rewriting. Proofs of termination of CSR are also possible via existing transformations to TRSs (without any replacement restriction) which are also implemented in mu-term.

Using Context-Sensitive Rewriting for Proving Innermost Termination of Rewriting

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2009

Computational systems based on reducing expressions usually have a predefined reduction strategy to break down the nondeterminism which is inherent to reduction relations. The innermost strategy corresponds to call by value or eager computation, that is, the computational mechanism of several programming languages like Maude, OBJ, etc. where the arguments of a function call are always evaluated before calling the function. This strategy usually fails to terminate when nonterminating computations are possible in the programs and many eager programming languages also admit the explicit specification of a particular class of strategy annotations to (try to) avoid them. Context-Sensitive Rewriting provides an abstract model to describe and analyze the operational behavior of such programs. This paper aims at contributing to the development of appropriate techniques and tools for the verification of program termination in the aforementioned programming languages, so we focus on termination of innermost (context-sensitive) rewriting. We adapt the notion of usable argument introduced by Fernández to prove innermost termination by proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting. Thanks to our recent developments for proving termination of (innermost) context-sensitive rewriting using dependency pairs, now we can also relax monotonicity requirements for proving innermost termination of (context-sensitive) rewriting. We have implemented these new improvements in the termination tool mu-term and evaluated the results with some benchmarks.

Non-transformational termination analysis of logic programs, based on general term-orderings

Logic Based Program Synthesis and …, 2001

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 termination analysis, but that we apply these orderings directly to the logic program and not to the term-rewrite system obtained through some transformation. We de ne a variant of acceptability, based on general term-orderings, and show how it is equivalent to LD-termination for well-moded, simply moded programs. We develop a demand driven, constraintbased approach to verify this acceptability-variant.

Multiset Path Orderings and Their Application to Termination of Term Rewriting Systems

Mathematical Theory and Modeling, 2013

In this expository paper, a comprehensive study of multiset orderings, nested multiset orderings and multiset path orderings is presented. In particular, it is illustrated how multiset path orderings admit the use of relatively simple and intuitive termination functions that lead to termination of a class of term rewriting systems.

Transformation of left terminating programs: The reordering problem

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1996

An Unfold/Fold transformation system is a source-to-source rewriting methodology devised to improve the efficiency of a program. Any such transformation should preserve the main properties of the initial program: among them, termination. When dealing with logic programs such as PRO-LOG programs, one is particularly interested in preserving left termination i.e. termination wrt the leftmost selection rule, which is by far the most widely employed of the search rules. Unfortunately, the most popular Unfold/Fold transformation systems ([TS84, Sek91]) do not preserve the above termination property. In this paper we study the reasons why left termination may be spoiled by the application of a transformation operation and we present a transformation system based on the operations of Unfold, Fold and Switch which -if applied to a left terminating programs -yields a program which is left terminating as well.

The size-change principle and dependency pairs for termination of term rewriting

Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing, 2005

, a new size-change principle was proposed to verify termination of functional programs automatically. We extend this principle in order to prove termination and innermost termination of arbitrary term rewrite systems (TRSs). Moreover, we compare this approach with existing techniques for termination analysis of TRSs (such as recursive path orders or dependency pairs). It turns out that the size-change principle on its own fails for many examples that can be handled by standard techniques for rewriting, but there are also TRSs where it succeeds whereas existing rewriting techniques fail. Moreover, we also compare the complexity of the respective methods. To this end, we develop the first complexity analysis for the dependency pair approach. While the size-change principle is PSPACE-complete, we prove that the dependency pair approach (in combination with classical path orders) is only NP-complete. To benefit from their respective advantages, we show how to combine the size-change principle with classical orders and with dependency pairs. In this way, we obtain a new approach for automated termination proofs of TRSs which is more powerful than previous approaches. We also show that the combination with dependency pairs does not increase the complexity of the size-change principle, i.e., the combined approach is still PSPACE-complete.

Automated termination proofs with AProVE

2004

We describe the system AProVE, an automated prover to verify (innermost) termination of term rewrite systems (TRSs). For this system, we have developed and implemented efficient algorithms based on classical simplification orders, dependency pairs, and the size-change principle. In particular, it contains many new improvements of the dependency pair approach that make automated termination proving more powerful and efficient. In AProVE, termination proofs can be performed with a user-friendly graphical interface and the system is currently among the most powerful termination provers available.

Non-transformational Termination Analysis of Logic Programs

Based on General Term-Orderings, Selected Papers …, 2000

The Dependency Pair Framework: Combining Techniques for Automated Termination Proofs

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

The dependency pair approach is one of the most powerful techniques for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems. Up to now, it was regarded as one of several possible methods to prove termination. In this paper, we show that dependency pairs can instead be used as a general concept to integrate arbitrary techniques for termination analysis. In this way, the benefits of different techniques can be combined and their modularity and power are increased significantly. We refer to this new concept as the "dependency pair framework " to distinguish it from the old "dependency pair approach". Moreover, this framework facilitates the development of new methods for termination analysis. To demonstrate this, we present several new techniques within the dependency pair framework which simplify termination problems considerably. We implemented the dependency pair framework in our termination prover AProVE and evaluated it on large collections of examples.

AProVE: A system for proving termination (original) (raw)

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