Program Completionin the Input Language of GRINGO

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to define and automate the generation of program completion formulas for ASP programs in GRINGO's input language, aiding programmers in understanding and verifying their logic programs.

Contribution

It proposes a new definition of program completion for a broad class of ASP programs in GRINGO's language and studies its properties.

Findings

Defines completion for ASP programs in GRINGO language

Automates generation and simplification of completion formulas

Helps programmers understand program behavior

Abstract

We argue that turning a logic program into a set of completed definitions can be sometimes thought of as the "reverse engineering" process of generating a set of conditions that could serve as a specification for it. Accordingly, it may be useful to define completion for a large class of ASP programs and to automate the process of generating and simplifying completion formulas. Examining the output produced by this kind of software may help programmers to see more clearly what their program does, and to what degree its behavior conforms with their expectations. As a step toward this goal, we propose here a definition of program completion for a large class of programs in the input language of the ASP grounder GRINGO, and study its properties. This note is under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.