Nominal logic is a first-order theory of names and binding based on a primitive operation of swapping rather than substitution. Urban, Pitts, and Gabbay have developed a nominal unification algorithm that unifies terms up to nominal equality. However, because of nominal logic's equivariance principle, atomic formulas can be provably equivalent without being provably equal as terms, so resolution using nominal unification is sound but incomplete. For complete resolution, a more general form of unification called equivariant unification, or "unification up to a permutation" is required. Similarly, for rewrite rules expressed in nominal logic, a more general form of matching called equivariant matching is necessary. In this paper, we study the complexity of the decision problem for equivariant unification and matching. We show that these problems are NP-complete in general. However, when one of the terms is essentially first-order, equivariant and nominal unification coincide. This shows that equivariant unification can be performed efficiently in many interesting common cases: for example, anypurely first-order logic program or rewrite system can be run efficiently on nominal terms.

Nominal rewriting is based on the observation that if we add support for alphaequivalence to first-order syntax using the nominal-set approach, then systems with binding, including higher-order reduction schemes such as lambda-calculus betareduction, can be smoothly represented. Nominal rewriting maintains a strict distinction between variables of the objectlanguage (atoms) and of the meta-language (variables or unknowns). Atoms may be bound by a special abstraction operation, but variables cannot be bound, giving the framework a pronounced first-order character, since substitution of terms for variables is not capture-avoiding. We show how good properties of first-order rewriting survive the extension, by giving an efficient rewriting algorithm, a critical pair lemma, and a confluence theorem

Nominal matching and unification underly the dynamics of nominal rewriting. Urban, Pitts and Gabbay gave a nominal unification algorithm which finds the most general solution to a nominal matching or unification problem, if one exists. Later the algorithm was extended by Fernández and Gabbay to deal with name generation and locality. In this paper we describe first a direct implementation of the nominal unification algorithm, including the extensions, in Maude. This implementation is not efficient (it is exponential in time), but we will show that we can obtain a feasible implementation by using termgraphs.

Birkhoff [1935] initiated the general study of algebraic structure. Importantly for our concerns here, his development was from (universal) algebra to (equational) logic. Birkhoff’s starting point was the informal conception of algebra based on familiar concrete examples. Abstracting from these, he introduced the concepts of signature and equational presentation,

nominal rewriting and efficiently computable nominal algebra equality

We present a logical framework based on the nominal approach to representing syntax with binders. First we extend nominal terms, which have a built-in name-abstraction operator and a first-order notion of substitution for variables, with a capture-avoiding substitution operator for names. We then build a dependent type system for this extended syntax