No Arabic abstract
We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is generally undecidable. However, by restricting the language to known decidable cases, we exhibit new classes of loops, the non-termination of which is decidable. We present a bunch of examples.
A simple linear loop is a simple while loop with linear assignments and linear loop guards. If a simple linear loop has only two program variables, we give a complete algorithm for computing the set of all the inputs on which the loop does not terminate. For the case of more program variables, we show that the non-termination set cannot be described by Tarski formulae in general
Five algebraic notions of termination are formalised, analysed and compared: wellfoundedness or Noetherity, Lobs formula, absence of infinite iteration, absence of divergence and normalisation. The study is based on modal semirings, which are additively idempotent semirings with forward and backward modal operators. To model infinite behaviours, idempotent semirings are extended to divergence semirings, divergence Kleene algebras and omega algebras. The resulting notions and techniques are used in calculational proofs of classical theorems of rewriting theory. These applications show that modal semirings are powerful tools for reasoning algebraically about the finite and infinite dynamics of programs and transition systems.
We present an efficient approach to prove termination of monotone programs with integer variables, an expressive class of loops that is often encountered in computer programs. Our approach is based on a lightweight static analysis method and takes advantage of simple %nice properties of monotone functions. Our preliminary implementation %beats shows that our tool has an advantage over existing tools and can prove termination for a high percentage of loops for a class of benchmarks.
We present a reduction of the termination problem for a Turing machine (in the simplified form of the Post correspondence problem) to the problem of determining whether a continuous-time Markov chain presented as a set of Kappa graph-rewriting rules has an equilibrium. It follows that the problem of whether a computable CTMC is dissipative (ie does not have an equilibrium) is undecidable.
Let S be a commutative semiring. M. Droste and P. Gastin have introduced in 2005 weighted monadic second order logic WMSOL with weights in S. They use a syntactic fragment RMSOL of WMSOL to characterize word functions (power series) recognizable by weighted automata, where the semantics of quantifiers is used both as arithmetical operations and, in the boolean case, as quantification. Already in 2001, B. Courcelle, J.Makowsky and U. Rotics have introduced a formalism for graph parameters definable in Monadic Second order Logic, here called MSOLEVAL with values in a ring R. Their framework can be easily adapted to semirings S. This formalism clearly separates the logical part from the arithmetical part and also applies to word functions. In this paper we give two proofs that RMSOL and MSOLEVAL with values in S have the same expressive power over words. One proof shows directly that MSOLEVAL captures the functions recognizable by weighted automata. The other proof shows how to translate the formalisms from one into the other.