This paper presents a formal semantic basis for the termination analysis of logic programs. The semantics exhibits the termination properties of a logic program through its binary unfoldings --- a possibly infinite set of binary clauses. Termination of a program P and goal G is determined by the absence of an infinite chain in the binary unfoldings of P starting with G. The result is of practical use as basing termination analysis on a formal semantics facilitates both the design and implementation of analyzers. A simple Prolog interpreter for binary unfoldings coupled with an abstract domain based on symbolic norm constraints is proposed as an implementation vehicle. We illustrate its application using two recently proposed abstract domains. Both techniques are implemented using a standard CLP(R) library. The combination of an interpreter for binary unfoldings and a constraint solver simplifies the design of the analyzer and improves its efficiency significantly. 1 Introduction This ...

Program specialisation aims at improving the overall performance of programs by performing source to source transformations. A common approach within functional and logic programming, known respectively as partial evaluation and partial deduction, is to exploit partial knowledge about the input. It is achieved through a well-automated application of parts of the Burstall-Darlington unfold/fold transformation framework. The main challenge in developing systems is to design automatic control that ensures correctness, efficiency, and termination. This survey and tutorial presents the main developments in controlling partial deduction over the past 10 years and analyses their respective merits and shortcomings. It ends with an assessment of current achievements and sketches some remaining research challenges.

Abstract. We illustrate the use of logic programming techniques for finite model checking of CTL formulae. We present a technique for infinite state model checking of safety properties based upon logic program specialisation and analysis techniques. The power of the approach is illustrated on several examples. For that, the efficient tools logen and ecce are used. We discuss how this approach has to be extended to handle more complicated infinite state systems and to handle arbitrary CTL formulae. 1

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Partial evaluation is a semantics-based program optimization technique which has been investigated within di#erent programming paradigms and applied to a wide variety of languages. Recently, a partial evaluation framework for functional logic programs has been proposed.

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Abstract. Well-quasi orders in general, and homeomorphic embedding in particular, have gained popularity to ensure the termination of techniques for program analysis, specialisation, transformation, and verification. In this paper we survey and discuss this use of homeomorphic embedding and clarify the advantages of such an approach over one using well-founded orders. We also discuss various extensions of the homeomorphic embedding relation. We conclude with a study of homeomorphic embedding in the context of metaprogramming, presenting some new (positive and negative) results and open problems.

Partial evaluation is an automatic technique for program optimization which preserves program semantics. The range of its potential applications is extremely large, as witnessed by successful experiences in several fields. This paper summarizes our findings in the development of partial evaluation tools for Curry, a modern multi-paradigm declarative language which combines features from functional, logic and concurrent programming. From a practical point of view, the most promising approach appears to be a recent partial evaluation framework which translates source programs into a maximally simplified representation. We support this statement by extending the underlying method in order to design a practical partial evaluation tool for the language Curry. The process is fully automatic and can be incorporated into a Curry compiler as a source-to-source transformation on intermediate programs. An implementation of the partial evaluator has been undertaken. Experimental resul...

Abstract. The integration of powerful partial evaluation methods into practical compilers for logic programs is still far from reality. This is related both to 1) efficiency issues and to 2) the complications of dealing with practical programs. Regarding efficiency, the most successful unfolding rules used nowadays are based on structural orders applied over (covering) ancestors, i.e., a subsequence of the atoms selected during a derivation. Unfortunately, maintaining the structure of the ancestor relation during unfolding introduces significant overhead. We propose an efficient, practical local unfolding rule based on the notion of covering ancestors which can be used in combination with any structural order and allows a stack-based implementation without losing any opportunities for specialization. Regarding the second issue, we propose assertion-based techniques which allow our approach to deal with real programs that include (Prolog) built-ins and external predicates in a very extensible manner. Finally, we report on our implementation of these techniques in a practical partial evaluator, embedded in a state of the art compiler which uses global analysis extensively (the Ciao compiler and, specifically, its preprocessor CiaoPP). The performance analysis of the resulting system shows that our techniques, in addition to dealing with practical programs, are also significantly more efficient in time and somewhat more efficient in memory than traditional tree-based implementations. 1

On-line partial evaluation algorithms include a generalisation step, which is needed to ensure termination. In partial evaluation of logic and functional programs, the usual generalisation operation applied to computation states is the most specific generalisation (msg) of expressions. This can cause loss of information, which is especially serious in programs whose computations #rst build some internal data structure, which is then used to control a subsequent phase of execution - a common pattern of computation. If the size of the intermediate data is unbounded at partial evaluation time then the msg will lose almost all information about its structure. Hence the second phase of computation cannot be effectively specialised. In this paper