A dynamic approach to characterizing termination of general logic programs
Yi-Dong Shen, Jia-Huai You, Li-Yan Yuan, Samuel S. P. Shen, Qiang Yang · ACM Transactions on Computational Logic · 2003
We present a new characterization of termination of general logic programs. Most existing termination analysis approaches rely on some static information about the structure of the source code of a logic program, such as modes/types, norms/level mappings, models/interargument relations, and the like. We propose a dynamic approach that employs some key dynamic features of an infinite (generalized) SLDNF-derivation, such as repetition of selected subgoals and recursive increase in term size. We also introduce a new formulation of SLDNF-trees, called generalized SLDNF-trees. Generalized SLDNF-trees deal with negative subgoals in the same way as Prolog and exist for any general logic programs.