Termination analysis for mercury

Since the late eighties, much progress has been made in the theory of termination analysis for logic programs. However, the practical significance of much of this work is hard to judge, since experimental evaluations rarely get published. Here we describe and evaluate a termination analyzer for Mercury, a strongly typed and moded logic-functional programming language. Mercury's high degree of referential transparency and the guaranteed availability of reliable mode information simplify termination analysis. Our analyzer uses a variant of a method developed by Plumer. It deals with full Mercury, including modules and I/O. In spite of these obstacles, it produces state-of-the-art termination information, while having a negligible impact on the running time of the compiler of which it is part, even for large programs.