this paper we show that it is sufficient to impose the constructor discipline for obtaining the modularity of completeness. This result is a simple consequence of a quite powerful divide and conquer technique for establishing completeness of such constructor systems. Our approach is not limited to systems which are composed of disjoint parts. The importance of our method is that we may decompose a given constructor system into parts which possibly share function symbols and rewrite rules in order to infer completeness. We obtain a similar technique for semi-completeness, i.e. the combination of confluence and weak normalisation. 1. Introduction

It is well-known that termination is not a modular property of term rewriting systems, i.e., it is not preserved under disjoint union. The objective of this paper is to provide a "uniform framework" for sufficient conditions which ensure the modularity of termination. We will prove the following result. Whenever the disjoint union of two terminating term rewriting systems is non-terminating, then one of the systems is not C E -terminating (i.e., it looses its termination property when extended with the rules Cons(x; y) ! x and Cons(x; y) ! y) and the other is collapsing. This result has already been achieved by Gramlich [7] for finitely branching term rewriting systems. A more sophisticated approach is necessary, however, to prove it in full generality. Most of the known sufficient criteria for the preservation of termination [24, 15, 13, 7] follow as corollaries from our result, and new criteria are derived. This paper particularly settles the open question whether simple termination ...

We investigate restricted termination and confluence properties of term rewriting systems, in particular weak termination and innermost termination, and their interrelation. New criteria are provided which are sufficient for the equivalence of innermost / weak termination and uniform termination of term rewriting systems. These criteria provide interesting possibilities to infer completeness, i.e. termination plus confluence, from restricted termination and confluence properties. Using these basic results we are also able to prove some new results about modular termination of rewriting. In particular, we show that termination is modular for some classes of innermost terminating and locally confluent term rewriting systems, namely for non-overlapping and even for overlay systems. As an easy consequence this latter result also entails a simplified proof of the fact that completeness is a decomposable property of so-called constructor systems. Furthermore we show how to obtain similar re...

This paper is concerned with the impact of stepwise development methodologies on prototyping.