A Web-based Tool Combining Different Type Analyses

TL;DR

This paper presents a web-based tool that integrates multiple types of logic program analyses, enabling interactive examination and combination of different analysis styles for improved program understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel web tool that combines various type analyses, allowing interactive exploration and integration of descriptive and prescriptive types for logic programs.

Findings

Interactive analysis visualization with clickable program points

Automatic inference of descriptive regular types

Generation of minimal domain models for enhanced precision

Abstract

There are various kinds of type analysis of logic programs. These include for example inference of types that describe an over-approximation of the success set of a program, inference of well-typings, and abstractions based on given types. Analyses can be descriptive or prescriptive or a mixture of both, and they can be goal-dependent or goal-independent. We describe a prototype tool that can be accessed from a web browser, allowing various type analyses to be run. The first goal of the tool is to allow the analysis results to be examined conveniently by clicking on points in the original program clauses, and to highlight ill-typed program constructs, empty types or other type anomalies. Secondly the tool allows combination of the various styles of analysis. For example, a descriptive regular type can be automatically inferred for a given program, and then that type can be used to generate the minimal "domain model" of the program with respect to the corresponding pre-interpretation, which can give more precise information than the original descriptive type.