Abstract Domains for Universal and Existential Properties:9th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2000 Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2000 Berlin, Germany, March 25 – April 2, 2000 Proceedings

Abstract interpretation theory has successfully been used for constructing algorithms to statically determine run-time properties of programs. Central is the notion of an abstract domain, describing certain properties of interest about the program. In logic programming, program analyses typically fall into two different categories: either they detect program points where the property definitely holds (universal analyses) or possibly holds (existential analyses). We study the relation between such analyses in the case where the concrete domain is a lattice join-generated by its set of join-irreducible elements. Although our intended application is for logic programming, the theory is sufficiently general for possible applications to other languages.