Authors
Claus-Peter Wirth
Title
Shallow Confluence of Conditional Term Rewriting Systems
In
J. Symbolic Computation, 2009, 44:60--98
Bibtex Entry
Permanent URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsc.2008.05.005
Copyright Owner
Elsevier
Abstract
Recursion can be conveniently modeled with left-linear positive/negative-conditional term rewriting systems, provided that non-termination, non-trivial critical overlaps, non-right-stability, non-normality, and extra variables are admitted. For such systems we present novel sufficient criteria for shallow confluence and arrive at the first decidable confluence criterion admitting non-trivial critical overlaps. To this end, we restrict the introduction of extra variables of right-hand sides to binding equations and require the critical pairs to have somehow complementary literals in their conditions. Shallow confluence implies [level] confluence, has applications in functional logic programming, and guarantees the object-level consistency of the underlying data types in the inductive theorem prover QuodLibet