Termination proofs for logic programs with tabling

  • Authors:
  • Sofie Verbaeten;Danny De Schreye;Konstantinos Sagonas

  • Affiliations:
  • Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium;Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium;Uppsala Univ., Uppsala, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Tabled evaluation is receiving increasing attention in the logic programming community. It avoids many of the shortcomings of SLD execution and provides a more flexible and often considerably more efficient execution mechanism for logic programs. In particular, tabled execution terminates more often than execution based on SLD-resolution. In this article, we introduce two notions of universal termination of logic programming with tabling: quasi-termination and (the stronger notion of) LG-termination. We present sufficient conditions for these two notions of termination, namely quasi-acceptability and LG-acceptability, and we show that these conditions are also necessary in case the selection of tabled predicates meets certain natural criteria. Starting from these conditions, we develop modular termination proofs, i.e., proofs capable of combining termination proofs of separate programs to obtain termination proofs of combined programs. Finally, in the presence of mode information, we state sufficient conditions which form the basis for automatically proving termination in a constraint-based way.