Suspension Analysis for Concurrent Logic Programs

Michael Codish, Moreno Falaschi and Kim Marriott

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems; 16 (3): 649-686, 1994

Abstract:

Concurrent logic languages specify reactive systems which consist of collections of communicating processes. The presence of unintended suspended computations is a common programming error which is difficult to detect using standard debugging and testing techniques. We develop a number of analyses, based on abstract interpretation, which succeed if a program is definitely suspension free. If an analysis fails the program may, or may not, be suspension free. Examples demonstrate that the analyses are practically useful. They are conceptually simple and easy to justify because they are based directly on the transition system semantics of concurrent logic programs. A naive analysis must consider all scheduling policies. However, it is proven that for our analyses it suffices to consider only one scheduling policy, allowing for efficient implementation.

Available: bibtex entry compressed postscript

Michael Codish
The Department of Computer Science
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
PoB 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel
mcodish@cs.bgu.ac.il