Let E be a first-order equational theory. A translation of typed higher-order E-unification problems into a typed combinatory logic framework is presented and justified. The case in which E admits presentation as a convergent term rewriting system is treated in detail: in this situation, a modification of ordinary narrowing is shown to be a complete method for enumerating higher-order E-unifiers. In fact, we treat a more general problem, in which the types of terms contain type variables. 1 Introduction Investigation of the interaction between first-order and higher-order equational reasoning has emerged as an active line of research. The collective import of a recent series of papers, originating with [Bre88] and including (among others) [Bar90], [BG91a], [BG91b], [Dou92], [JO91] and [Oka89], is that when various typed -calculi are enriched by first-order equational theories, the validity problem is well-behaved, and furthermore that the respective computational approaches to ...

We present an algorithm for unification in the simply typed lambda calculus which enumerates complete sets of unifiers using a finitely branching search space. In fact, the types of terms may contain type-variables, so that a solution may involve typesubstitution as well as term-substitution. the problem is first translated into the problem of unification with respect to extensional equality in combinatory logic, and the algorithm is defined in terms of transformations on systems of combinatory terms. These transformations are based on a new method (itself based on systems) for deciding extensional equality between typed combinatory logic terms. 1 Introduction This paper develops a new algorithm for higher-order unification. A higher-order unification problem is specified by two terms F and G of the explicitly simply typed lambda calculus LC; a solution is a substitution oe such that oeF = fij oeG. We will always assume the extensionality axiom j in this paper. In fact we tre...

Abstract. We provide a complete system of transformation rules for semantic unification with respect to theories defined by convergent rewrite systems. We show that this standard unification procedure, with slight modifications, can be used to solve the satisfiability problem in combinatory logic with a convergent set of algebraic axioms R, thus resulting in a complete higher-order unification procedure for R. Furthermore, we use the system of transformation rules to provide a syntactic characterization for R which results in decidability of semantic unification. 1