Abstract not found

We present techniques to prove termination and innermost termination of term rewriting systems automatically. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not compare left- and right-hand sides of rewrite rules, but introduce the notion of dependency pairs to compare left-hand sides with special subterms of the right-hand sides. This results in a technique which allows to apply existing methods for automated termination proofs to term rewriting systems where they failed up to now. In particular, there are numerous term rewriting systems where a direct termination proof with simplification orderings is not possible, but in combination with our technique, well-known simplification orderings (such as the recursive path ordering, polynomial orderings, or the Knuth-Bendix ordering) can now be used to prove termination automatically. Unlike previous methods, our technique for proving innermost termination automatically can also be applied to prove innermost termination of term rewriting systems that are not terminating. Moreover, as innermost termination implies termination for certain classes of term rewriting systems, this technique can also be used for termination proofs of such systems.

A new kind of transformation of term rewriting systems (TRS) is proposed, depending on a choice for a model for the TRS. The labelled TRS is obtained from the original one by labelling operation symbols, possibly creating extra copies of some rules. This construction has the remarkable property that the labelled TRS is terminating if and only if the original TRS is terminating. Although the labelled version has more operation symbols and may have more rules (sometimes infinitely many), termination is often easier to prove for the labelled TRS than for the original one. This provides a new technique for proving termination, making classical techniques like path orders and polynomial interpretations applicable even for non-simplifying TRS's. The requirement of having a model can slightly be weakened, yielding a remarkably simple termination proof of the system SUBST of [11] describing explicit substitution in λ-calculus.

The aim of this paper is to present the s-calculus which is a very simple -calculus with explicit substitutions and to prove its confluence on closed terms and the preservation of strong normalisation of -terms. We shall prove strong normalisation of the corresponding calculus of substitution by translating it into the oe-calculus [ACCL91], and therefore the relation between both calculi will be made explicit. The confluence of the s-calculus is obtained by the "interpretation method" ([Har89], [CHL92]). The proof of the preservation of normalisation follows the lines of an analogous result for the AE-calculus (cf. [BBLRD95]). The relation between s and AE is also studied.

To simplify the task of proving termination of term rewriting systems, several elimination methods, such as the dummy elimination, the distribution elimination, the general dummy elimination and the improved general dummy elimination, have been proposed. In this paper, we show that the argument ltering method combining with the dependency pair technique is essential in all the above elimination methods. We present remarkable simple proofs for the soundness of these elimination methods based on this observation. Moreover, we propose a new elimination method, called the argument ltering transformation, which is not only more powerful than all the other elimination methods but also especially useful to make clear the essential relation hidden behind these methods.

Context-sensitive rewriting is a computational restriction of term rewriting used to model non-strict (lazy) evaluation in functional programming. The goal of this paper is the study and development of techniques to analyze the termination behavior of context-sensitive rewrite systems. For that purpose, several methods have been proposed in the literature which transform context-sensitive rewrite systems into ordinary rewrite systems such that termination of the transformed ordinary system implies termination of the original context-sensitive system. In this way, the huge variety of existing techniques for termination analysis of ordinary rewriting can be used for context-sensitive rewriting, too. We analyze the existing transformation techniques for proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting and we suggest two new transformations. Our first method is simple, sound, and more powerful than the previously proposed transformations. However, it is not complete, i.e., there are terminating context-sensitive rewrite systems that are transformed into non-terminating term rewrite systems. The second method that we present in this paper is both sound and complete. All these observations also hold for rewriting modulo associativity and commutativity.

Although theoretically it is very powerful, the semantic path ordering (SPO) is not so useful in practice, since its monotonicity has to be proved by hand for each concrete term rewrite system (TRS). In this paper we present a monotonic variation of SPO, called MSPO. It characterizes termination, i.e., a TRS is terminating if and only if its rules are included in some MSPO. Hence MSPO is a complete termination method. On the practical side, it can be easily automated using as ingredients standard interpretations and general-purpose orderings like RPO. This is shown to be a sufficiently powerful way to handle several non-trivial examples and to obtain methods like dummy elimination or dependency pairs as particular cases. Finally, we obtain some positive modularity results for termination based on MSPO. 1 Introduction Rewrite systems are sets of rules (directed equations) used to compute by repeatedly replacing parts of a given formula with equal ones until the simplest po...

To prove termination of term rewriting systems (TRSs), several methods have been developed to synthesize suitable well-founded orderings automatically. However, virtually all orderings that are amenable to automation are so-called simplification orderings. Unfortunately, there exist numerous interesting and relevant TRSs that cannot be oriented by orderings of this restricted class and therefore their termination cannot be proved automatically with the existing techniques. In this paper we present a new automatic approach which allows to apply the standard techniques for automated termination proofs to those TRSs where these techniques failed up to now. For that purpose we have developed a procedure which, given a TRS, generates a set of inequalities (constraints) automatically. If there exists a well-founded ordering satisfying these constraints, then the TRS is terminating. It turns out that for many TRSs where a direct application of standard techniques fails, these standard techniq...

We present two new transformation techniques for proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting. Our first method is simple, sound, and more powerful than previously suggested transformations. However, it is not complete, i.e., there are terminating context-sensitive rewrite systems that are transformed into non-terminating term rewrite systems. The second method that we present in this paper is both sound and complete. This latter result can be interpreted as stating that from a termination perspective there is no reason to study context-sensitive rewriting.

We present a technique to prove innermost normalisation of term rewriting systems (TRSs) automatically. In contrast to previous methods, our technique is able to prove innermost normalisation of TRSs that are not terminating. Our technique can also be used for termination proofs of all TRSs where innermost normalisation implies termination, such as non-overlapping TRSs or locally confluent overlay systems. In this way, termination of many (also non-simply terminating) TRSs can be verified automatically. 1. Introduction Innermost rewriting, i.e. rewriting where only innermost redexes are contracted, can be used to model call-by-value computation semantics. For that reason, there has been an increasing interest in innermost normalisation (also called innermost termination), i.e. in proving that the length of every innermost reduction is finite. Techniques for proving innermost normalisation can for example be utilized for termination proofs of functional programs (modelled by TRSs) or o...