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Termination Analysis of Higher-Order Functional Programs

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3780))

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Abstract

Size-change termination (SCT) automatically identifies termination of first-order functional programs. The SCT principle: a program terminates if every infinite control flow sequence would cause an infinite descent in a well-founded data value (POPL 2001).

More recent work (RTA 2004) developed a termination analysis of the pure untyped λ-calculus using a similar approach, but an entirely different notion of size was needed to compare higher-order values. Again this is a powerful analysis, even proving termination of certain λ-expressions containing the fixpoint combinator Y. However the language analysed is tiny, not even containing constants.

These techniques are unified and extended significantly, to yield a termination analyser for higher-order, call-by-value programs as in ML’s purely functional core or similar functional languages. Our analyser has been proven correct, and implemented for a substantial subset of OCaml.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford University Computing Laboratory,  

    Damien Sereni

  2. DIKU, University of Copenhagen,  

    Neil D. Jones

Authors
  1. Damien Sereni
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  2. Neil D. Jones
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Seoul National University, Korea

    Kwangkeun Yi

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Sereni, D., Jones, N.D. (2005). Termination Analysis of Higher-Order Functional Programs. In: Yi, K. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3780. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11575467_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11575467_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29735-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32247-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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