Program completion in the input language of GRINGO

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 paper is published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, Volume 17, Issue 05-06 (the special issue on the 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming).