In a previous work ("Abstract Data Type Systems", TCS 173(2), 1997), the leI two authors presented a combined lmbined made of a (strongl normal3zG9 alrmal rewrite system and a typed #-calA#Ik enriched by pattern-matching definitions folnitio a certain format,calat the "General Schema", whichgeneral39I theusual recursor definitions fornatural numbers and simil9 "basic inductive types". This combined lmbined was shown to bestrongl normalIk39f The purpose of this paper is toreformul33 and extend theGeneral Schema in order to make it easil extensibl3 to capture a more general cler of inductive types, cals, "strictly positive", and to ease the strong normalgAg9Ik proof of theresulGGg system. Thisresul provides a computation model for the combination of anal"DAfGI specification language based on abstract data types and of astrongl typed functional language with strictly positive inductive types.

Term Rewriting Systems play an important role in various areas, such as abstract data type specifications, implementations of functional programming languages and automated deduction. In this chapter we introduce several of the basic comcepts and facts for TRS's. Specifically, we discuss Abstract Reduction Systems

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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.

For several decision problems about semi-Thue systems, we try to locate the frontier between the decidable and the undecidable from the point of view of the number of rules. We show that the the Termination Problem, the U-Termination Problem, the Accessibility Problem and the Common-Descendant Problem are undecidable for 3 rules STS. As a corollary we obtain the undecidability of the Post-Correspondence Problem for 7 rules.

Modular properties of term rewriting systems, i.e. properties which are preserved under disjoint unions, have attracted an increasing attention within the last few years. Whereas confluence is modular this does not hold true in general for termination. By means of a careful analysis of potential counterexamples we prove the following abstract result. Whenever the disjoint union R1 \Phi R2 of two (finitely branching) terminating term rewriting systems R1 , R2 is non-terminating, then one of the systems, say R1 , enjoys an interesting (undecidable) property, namely it is not termination preserving under non-deterministic collapses, i.e. R1 \Phi fG(x; y) ! x; G(x; y) ! yg is non-terminating, and the other system R2 is collapsing, i.e. contains a rule with a variable right hand side. This result generalizes known sufficient criteria for modular termination of rewriting and provides the basis for a couple of derived modularity results. Furthermore, we prove that the minimal rank of pote...

Most systems for the automation of termination proofs using polynomial orderings are only semi-automatic, i.e. the "right" polynomial ordering has to be given by the user. We show that a variation of Lankford's partial derivative technique leads to an easier and slightly more powerful method than most other semi-automatic approaches. Based on this technique we develop a method for the automated synthesis of a suited polynomial ordering.

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...

. Shostak's congruence closure algorithm is demystified, using the framework of ground completion on (possibly nonterminating, non-reduced) rewrite rules. In particular, the canonical rewriting relation induced by the algorithm on ground terms by a given set of ground equations is precisely constructed. The main idea is to extend the signature of the original input to include new constant symbols for nonconstant subterms appearing in the input. A byproduct of this approach is (i) an algorithm for associating a confluent rewriting system with possibly nonterminating ground rewrite rules, and (ii) a new quadratic algorithm for computing a canonical rewriting system from ground equations. 1 Introduction Equality reasoning has been found critical in many applications including compiler optimization, functional languages, and reasoning about data bases, most importantly, reasoning about different aspects of software and hardware --- circuits, programs and specifications. Signific...

This report contains a collection of examples to demonstrate the use and the power of the dependency pair technique developed by Arts and Giesl. This technique allows automated termination and innermost termination proofs for many term rewrite systems for which such proofs were not possible before.