Normalizable Horn Clauses, Strongly Recognizable Relations, and Spi

  • Authors:
  • Flemming Nielson;Hanne Riis Nielson;Helmut Seidl

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SAS '02 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Static Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We exhibit a rich class of Horn clauses, which we call H1, whose least models, though possibly infinite, can be computed effectively. We show that the least model of an H1 clause consists of so-called strongly recognizable relations and present an exponential normalization procedure to compute it. In order to obtain a practical tool for program analysis, we identify a restriction of H1 clauses, which we call H2, where the least models can be computed in polynomial time. This fragment still allows to express, e.g., Cartesian product and transitive closure of relations. Inside H2, we exhibit a fragment H3 where normalization is even cubic. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by deriving a cubic control-flow analysis for the Spi calculus [1] as presented in [14].