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CW 306
A. Serebrenik and D. De Schreye
On termination of meta-programs
Abstract
The term meta-programming refers to the ability of writing programs that have other programs as data and exploit their semantics. The aim of this paper is presenting a methodology allowing to perform a correct termination analysis for a broad class of practical meta-interpreters, including negation and performing different tasks during the execution, together with different classes of object programs. It is based on combining power of general term-orders, used in proving termination of term-rewrite systems and programs, and on the well-known acceptability condition, used in proving termination of logic programs. The methodology establishes a relationship between the order needed to prove termination of the object program and the order needed to prove termination of the meta-interpreter together with this object program. If such a relationship is established, termination of one of those implies termination of the other one, i.e., that the meta-interpreter improves (preserves) termination. Among the meta-interpreters that are analysed correctly are a proof trees constructing meta-interpreter, different kinds of tracers and reasoners.
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