Combinatory Reduction Systems, or CRSs for short, were designed to combine the usual first-order format of term rewriting with the presence of bound variables as in pure -calculus and various typed -calculi. Bound variables are also present in many other rewrite systems, such as systems with simplification rules for proof normalization. The original idea of CRSs is due to Aczel, who introduced a restricted class of CRSs and, under the assumption of orthogonality, proved confluence. Orthogonality means that the rules are non-ambiguous (no overlap leading to a critical pair) and left-linear (no global comparison of terms necessary). We introduce the class of orthogonal CRSs, illustrated with many examples, discuss its expressive power, and give an outline of a short proof of confluence. This proof is a direct generalization of Aczel's original proof, which is close to the well-known confluence proof for -calculus by Tait and Martin-Lof. There is a well-known connection between the para...

3.1 Presentation of the λ-Calculus..................... 5