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European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems

ESOP 2014: Programming Languages and Systems pp 412–431Cite as

An Abstract Domain to Infer Ordinal-Valued Ranking Functions

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 8410)

Abstract

The traditional method for proving program termination consists in inferring a ranking function. In many cases (i.e. programs with unbounded non-determinism), a single ranking function over natural numbers is not sufficient. Hence, we propose a new abstract domain to automatically infer ranking functions over ordinals.

We extend an existing domain for piecewise-defined natural-valued ranking functions to polynomials in ω, where the polynomial coefficients are natural-valued functions of the program variables. The abstract domain is parametric in the choice of the maximum degree of the polynomial, and the types of functions used as polynomial coefficients.

We have implemented a prototype static analyzer for a while-language by instantiating our domain using affine functions as polynomial coefficients. We successfully analyzed small but intricate examples that are out of the reach of existing methods.

To our knowledge this is the first abstract domain able to reason about ordinals. Handling ordinals leads to a powerful approach for proving termination of imperative programs, which in particular subsumes existing techniques based on lexicographic ranking functions.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking under grant agreement no. 269335 (ARTEMIS project MBAT) (see Article II.9. of the JU Grant Agreement).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ÉNS & CNRS & INRIA, Paris, France

    Caterina Urban & Antoine Miné

Authors
  1. Caterina Urban
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  2. Antoine Miné
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Zhong Shao

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Urban, C., Miné, A. (2014). An Abstract Domain to Infer Ordinal-Valued Ranking Functions. In: Shao, Z. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. ESOP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8410. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54833-8_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54833-8_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-54832-1

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