Transforming acyclic programs

Annalisa Bossi, Sandro Etalle

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    Abstract

    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. In the field of logic programming, the class of acyclic programs plays an important role in this respect, since it is closely related to the one of terminating programs. The two classes coincide when negation is not allowed in the bodies of the clauses. We prove that the Unfold/Fold transformation system defined by Tamaki and Sato preserves the acyclicity of the initial program. From this result, it follows that when the transformation is applied to an acyclic program, then the finite failure set for definite programs is preserved; in the case of normal programs, all major declarative and operational semantics are preserved as well. These results cannot be extended to the class of left-terminating programs without modifying the definition of the transformation.
    Original languageUndefined
    Pages (from-to)1081-1096
    Number of pages16
    JournalACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
    Volume16
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jul 1994

    Keywords

    • terminating programs
    • Termination
    • IR-55874
    • Acyclic programs
    • EWI-1167

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