. Rewriting is a general paradigm for expressing computations in various logics, and we focus here on rewriting techniques in equational logic. When used at the proof level, rewriting provides with a very powerful methodology for proving completeness results, a technique that is illustrated here. We also consider whether important properties of rewrite systems such as confluence and termination can be proved in a modular way. Finally, we stress the links between rewriting and tree automata. Previous surveys include [21; 18; 37; 12; 45; 46]. The present one owes much to [21]. Keywords. completion, confluence, critical pair, ground reducibility, inductive completion, local confluence, modularity, narrowing, order-sorted algebras, rewrite rule, rewriting, term algebra, termination, tree automata. 1 Introduction The use of equations is traditional in mathematics. Its use in computer science has culminated with the success of algebraic specifications, a method of specifying software by enc...

Abstract. Proofs of termination are essential for establishing the correct behavior of computing systems. There are various ways of establishing termination, but the most general involves the use of ordinals. An example of a theorem proving system in which ordinals are used to prove termination is ACL2. In ACL2, every function defined must be shown to terminate using the ordinals up to ɛ0. We use a compact notation for the ordinals up to ɛ0 (exponentially more succinct than the one used by ACL2) and define efficient algorithms for ordinal addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation. In this paper we describe our notation and algorithms, prove their correctness, and analyze their complexity. 1