Automated Termination Analysis for Incompletely Defined Programs

Abstract Incompletely defined programs provide an elegant and easy way to write and to reason about programs which may halt with a run time error by throwing an exception or printing an error message, e. g. when attempting to divide by zero. Due to the presence of stuck computations, which arise when calling incompletely defined procedures with invalid arguments, we cannot use the method of argument bounded algorithms for proving termination by machine. We analyze the problem and present a solution to improve this termination analysis method so that it works for incompletely defined programs as well. Our technique of proving the termination of incompletely defined programs maintains performance as well as simplicity of the original method and proved successful by an implementation in the verification tool \(\surd\) eriFun.

Authors

• Christoph Walther
• Stephan Schweitzer

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