It is important to prove that supposedly terminating programs actually terminate, particularly if those programs must be run on critical systems or downloaded into a client such as a mobile phone. Although termination of computer programs is generally undecidable, it is possible and useful to prove termination of a large, nontrivial subset of the terminating programs. In this article, we present our termination analyzer for sequential Java bytecode, based on a program property called path-length. We describe the analyses which are needed before the path-length can be computed such as sharing, cyclicity, and aliasing. Then we formally define the path-length analysis and prove it correct with respect to a reference denotational semantics of the bytecode. We show that a constraint logic program P CLP can be built from the result of the path-length analysis of a Java bytecode program P and formally prove that if P CLP terminates, then P also terminates. Hence a termination prover for constraint logic programs can be applied to prove the termination of P . We conclude with some discussion of the possibilities and limitations of our approach. Ours is the first existing termination analyzer for Java bytecode dealing with any kind of data structures dynamically allocated on the heap and which does not require any help or annotation on the part of the user.

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Software testing is one of the most popular validation techniques in the software industry. Surprisingly, we can only find a few approaches to testing in the context of logic programming. In this paper, we introduce a systematic approach for dynamic testing that combines both concrete and symbolic execution. Our approach is fully automatic and guarantees full path coverage when it terminates. We prove some basic properties of our technique and illustrate its practical usefulness through a prototype implementation.

The Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) Scheme merges logic programming with constraint solving over predefined domains. In this article, we study proof methods for universal left termination of constraint logic programs. We provide a sound and complete characterization of left termination for ideal CLP languages which generalizes acceptability of logic programs. The characterization is then refined to the notion of partial acceptability, which is well suited for automatic modular inference. We describe a theoretical framework for automation of the approach, which is implemented. For nonideal CLP languages and without any assumption on their incomplete constraint solvers, even the most basic sound termination criterion from logic programming does not lift. We focus on a specific system, namely CLP(R), by proposing some additional conditions that make (partial) acceptability sound

In this paper we introduce a class of constraint logic programs such that their termination can be proved by using affine level mappings. We show that membership to this class is decidable in polynomial time.