In the last twenty years, several approaches to higher-order rewriting have been proposed, among which Klop's Combinatory Rewrite Systems (CRSs), Nipkow's Higher-order Rewrite Systems (HRSs) and Jouannaud and Okada's higher-order algebraic specification languages, of which only the last one considers typed terms. The later approach has been extended by Jouannaud, Okada and the present author into Inductive Data Type Systems (IDTSs). In this paper, we extend IDTSs with the CRS higher-order pattern-matching mechanism, resulting in simply-typed CRSs. Then, we show how the termination criterion developed for IDTSs with first-order pattern-matching, called the General Schema, can be extended so as to prove the strong normalization of IDTSs with higher-order pattern-matching. Next, we compare the unified approach with HRSs. We first prove that the extended General Schema can also be applied to HRSs. Second, we show how Nipkow's higher-order critical pair analysis technique for proving local confluence can be applied to IDTSs.
Conditional term rewriting is an intuitive yet complex extension of term rewriting. In order to benefit from the simpler framework of unconditional rewriting, transformations have been defined to eliminate the conditions of conditional term rewrite systems. Recent results provide confluence criteria for conditional term rewrite systems via transformations, yet they are restricted to CTRSs with certain syntactic properties like weak left-linearity. These syntactic properties imply that the transformations are sound for the given CTRS. This paper shows how to use transformations to prove conflue…
In this paper we address the problem of proving confluence for string diagram rewriting, which was previously shown to be characterised combinatorically as double-pushout rewriting with interfaces (DPOI) on (labelled) hypergraphs. For standard DPO rewriting without interfaces, confluence for terminating rewrite systems is, in general, undecidable. Nevertheless, we show here that confluence for DPOI, and hence string diagram rewriting, is decidable. We apply this result to give effective procedures for deciding local confluence of symmetric monoidal theories with and without Frobenius structure…
The rule labeling heuristic aims to establish confluence of (left-)linear term rewrite systems via decreasing diagrams. We present a formalization of a confluence criterion based on the interplay of relative termination and the rule labeling in the theorem prover Isabelle. Moreover, we report on the integration of this result into the certifier CeTA, facilitating the checking of confluence certificates based on decreasing diagrams. The power of the method is illustrated by an experimental evaluation on a (standard) collection of confluence problems.
We present an affine-intuitionistic system of types and effects which can be regarded as an extension of Barber-Plotkin Dual Intuitionistic Linear Logic to multi-threaded programs with effects. In the system, dynamically generated values such as references or channels are abstracted into a finite set of regions. We introduce a discipline of region usage that entails the confluence (and hence determinacy) of the typable programs. Further, we show that a discipline of region stratification guarantees termination.
We present an affine-intuitionistic system of types and effects which can be regarded as an extension of Barber-Plotkin Dual Intuitionistic Linear Logic to multi-threaded programs with effects. In the system, dynamically generated values such as references or channels are abstracted into a finite set of regions. We introduce a discipline of region usage that entails the confluence (and hence determinacy) of the typable programs. Further, we show that a discipline of region stratification guarantees termination.
We investigate the new, Turing-complete class of layered systems, whose lefthand sides of rules can only be overlapped at a multiset of disjoint or equal positions. Layered systems define a natural notion of rank for terms: the maximal number of non-overlapping redexes along a path from the root to a leaf. Overlappings are allowed in finite or infinite trees. Rules may be non-terminating, non-left-linear, or non-right-linear. Using a novel unification technique, cyclic unification, and the so-alled subrewriting relation, we show that rank non-increasing layered systems are confluent provided t…
The linear-algebraic lambda-calculus and the algebraic lambda-calculus are untyped lambda-calculi extended with arbitrary linear combinations of terms. The former presents the axioms of linear algebra in the form of a rewrite system, while the latter uses equalities. When given by rewrites, algebraic lambda-calculi are not confluent unless further restrictions are added. We provide a type system for the linear-algebraic lambda-calculus enforcing strong normalisation, which gives back confluence. The type system allows an abstract interpretation in System F.
Termination is an important property of programs; notably required for programs formulated in proof assistants. It is a very active subject of research in the Turing-complete formalism of term rewriting systems, where many methods and tools have been developed over the years to address this problem. Ensuring reliability of those tools is therefore an important issue. In this paper we present a library formalizing important results of the theory of well-founded (rewrite) relations in the proof assistant Coq. We also present its application to the automated verification of termination certificat…
We introduce layer systems for proving generalizations of the modularity of confluence for first-order rewrite systems. Layer systems specify how terms can be divided into layers. We establish structural conditions on those systems that imply confluence. Our abstract framework covers known results like modularity, many-sorted persistence, layer-preservation and currying. We present a counterexample to an extension of persistence to order-sorted rewriting and derive new sufficient conditions for the extension to hold. All our proofs are constructive.
In a previous work, the first author extended to higher-order rewriting and dependent types the use of size annotations in types, a termination proof technique called type or size based termination and initially developed for ML-like programs. Here, we go one step further by considering conditional rewriting and explicit quantifications and constraints on size annotations. This allows to describe more precisely how the size of the output of a function depends on the size of its inputs. Hence, we can check the termination of more functions. We first give a general type-checking algorithm based …
The static dependency pair method is a method for proving the termination of higher-order rewrite systems a la Nipkow. It combines the dependency pair method introduced for first-order rewrite systems with the notion of strong computability introduced for typed lambda-calculi. Argument filterings and usable rules are two important methods of the dependency pair framework used by current state-of-the-art first-order automated termination provers. In this paper, we extend the class of higher-order systems on which the static dependency pair method can be applied. Then, we extend argument filteri…
In this paper, we show how to extend the notion of reducibility introduced by Girard for proving the termination of $β$-reduction in the polymorphic $λ$-calculus, to prove the termination of various kinds of rewrite relations on $λ$-terms, including rewriting modulo some equational theory and rewriting with matching modulo $β$$η$, by using the notion of computability closure. This provides a powerful termination criterion for various higher-order rewriting frameworks, including Klop's Combinatory Reductions Systems with simple types and Nipkow's Higher-order Rewrite Systems.
We present two methods for proving confluence of left-linear term rewrite systems. One is hot-decreasingness, combining the parallel/development closedness theorems with rule labelling based on a terminating subsystem. The other is critical-pair-closing system, allowing to boil down the confluence problem to confluence of a special subsystem whose duplicating rules are relatively terminating.
This article is concerned with automating the decreasing diagrams technique of van Oostrom for establishing confluence of term rewrite systems. We study abstract criteria that allow to lexicographically combine labelings to show local diagrams decreasing. This approach has two immediate benefits. First, it allows to use labelings for linear rewrite systems also for left-linear ones, provided some mild conditions are satisfied. Second, it admits an incremental method for proving confluence which subsumes recent developments in automating decreasing diagrams. The techniques proposed in the artic…
Several authors devised type-based termination criteria for ML-like languages allowing non-structural recursive calls. We extend these works to general rewriting and dependent types, hence providing a powerful termination criterion for the combination of rewriting and beta-reduction in the Calculus of Constructions.
We provide an overview of CPF, the certification problem format, and explain some design decisions. Whereas CPF was originally invented to combine three different formats for termination proofs into a single one, in the meanwhile proofs for several other properties of term rewrite systems are also expressible: like confluence, complexity, and completion. As a consequence, the format is already supported by several tools and certifiers. Its acceptance is also demonstrated in international competitions: the certified tracks of both the termination and the confluence competition utilized CPF as e…
We investigate the relationship between two independently developed termination techniques. On the one hand, sized-types based termination (SBT) uses types annotated with size expressions and Girard's reducibility candidates, and applies on systems using constructor matching only. On the other hand, semantic labelling transforms a rewrite system by annotating each function symbol with the semantics of its arguments, and applies to any rewrite system. First, we introduce a simplified version of SBT for the simply-typed lambda-calculus. Then, we give new proofs of the correctness of SBT using se…
We investigate the elimination of quantifiers in first-order formulas via Hilbert's epsilon-operator (or -binder), following Bernays' explicit definitions of the existential and the universal quantifier symbol by means of epsilon-terms. This elimination has its first explicit occurrence in the proof of the first epsilon-theorem in Hilbert-Bernays in 1939. We think that there is a lacuna in this proof w.r.t. this elimination, related to the erroneous assumption that explicit definitions always terminate. Surprisingly, to the best of our knowledge, nobody ever proved confluence or termination fo…
Termination of programs, i.e., the absence of infinite computations, ensures the existence of normal forms for all initial expressions, thus providing an essential ingredient for the definition of a normalization semantics for functional programs. In lazy functional languages, though, infinite data structures are often delivered as the outcome of computations. For instance, the list of all prime numbers can be returned as a neverending stream of numerical expressions or data structures. If such streams are allowed, requiring termination is hopeless. In this setting, the notion of productivity …
We provide a general and modular criterion for the termination of simply-typed $λ$ -calculus extended with function symbols defined by user-defined rewrite rules. Following a work of Hughes, Pareto and Sabry for functions defined with a fixpoint operator and pattern-matching, several criteria use typing rules for bounding the height of arguments in function calls. In this paper, we extend this approach to rewriting-based function definitions and more general user-defined notions of size.
We study the derivational complexity of rewrite systems whose termination is provable in the dependency pair framework using the processors for reduction pairs, dependency graphs, or the subterm criterion. We show that the derivational complexity of such systems is bounded by a multiple recursive function, provided the derivational complexity induced by the employed base techniques is at most multiple recursive. Moreover we show that this upper bound is tight.
Arts and Giesl proved that the termination of a first-order rewrite system can be reduced to the study of its "dependency pairs". We extend these results to rewrite systems on simply typed lambda-terms by using Tait's computability technique.
Higher-order rewrite systems (HRSs) and simply-typed term rewriting systems (STRSs) are computational models of functional programs. We recently proposed an extremely powerful method, the static dependency pair method, which is based on the notion of strong computability, in order to prove termination in STRSs. In this paper, we extend the method to HRSs. Since HRSs include λ-abstraction but STRSs do not, we restructure the static dependency pair method to allow λ-abstraction, and show that the static dependency pair method also works well on HRSs without new restrictions.
We generalise the termination method of higher-order polynomial interpretations to a setting with impredicative polymorphism. Instead of using weakly monotonic functionals, we interpret terms in a suitable extension of System F-omega. This enables a direct interpretation of rewrite rules which make essential use of impredicative polymorphism. In addition, our generalisation eases the applicability of the method in the non-polymorphic setting by allowing for the encoding of inductive data types. As an illustration of the potential of our method, we prove termination of a substantial fragment of…
Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficie…
While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops, where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system. However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain strategies. Therefore, our goal is to develop decision pro…
Refinement types are a well-studied manner of performing in-depth analysis on functional programs. The dependency pair method is a very powerful method used to prove termination of rewrite systems; however its extension to higher order rewrite systems is still the object of active research. We observe that a variant of refinement types allow us to express a form of higher-order dependency pair criterion that only uses information at the type level, and we prove the correctness of this criterion.
We revisit the static dependency pair method for proving termination of higher-order term rewriting and extend it in a number of ways: (1) We introduce a new rewrite formalism designed for general applicability in termination proving of higher-order rewriting, Algebraic Functional Systems with Meta-variables. (2) We provide a syntactically checkable soundness criterion to make the method applicable to a large class of rewrite systems. (3) We propose a modular dependency pair framework for this higher-order setting. (4) We introduce a fine-grained notion of formative and computable chains to re…
In order to increase user confidence, many automated theorem provers provide certificates that can be independently verified. In this paper, we report on our progress in developing a standalone tool for checking the correctness of certificates for the termination of term rewrite systems, and formally proving its correctness in the proof assistant Coq. To this end, we use the extraction mechanism of Coq and the library on rewriting theory and termination called CoLoR.
We propose a generalized version of context-sensitivity in term rewriting based on the notion of "forbidden patterns". The basic idea is that a rewrite step should be forbidden if the redex to be contracted has a certain shape and appears in a certain context. This shape and context is expressed through forbidden patterns. In particular we analyze the relationships among this novel approach and the commonly used notion of context-sensitivity in term rewriting, as well as the feasibility of rewriting with forbidden patterns from a computational point of view. The latter feasibility is character…
This paper introduces a propositional encoding for lexicographic path orders in connection with dependency pairs. This facilitates the application of SAT solvers for termination analysis of term rewrite systems based on the dependency pair method. We address two main inter-related issues and encode them as satisfiability problems of propositional formulas that can be efficiently handled by SAT solving: (1) the combined search for a lexicographic path order together with an \emph{argument filtering} to orient a set of inequalities; and (2) how the choice of the argument filtering influences the…
This paper presents two new approaches to prove termination of rewrite systems with the Knuth-Bendix order efficiently. The constraints for the weight function and for the precedence are encoded in (pseudo-)propositional logic and the resulting formula is tested for satisfiability. Any satisfying assignment represents a weight function and a precedence such that the induced Knuth-Bendix order orients the rules of the encoded rewrite system from left to right.
This paper introduces a new kind of propositional encoding for reasoning about partial orders. The symbols in an unspecified partial order are viewed as variables which take integer values and are interpreted as indices in the order. For a partial order statement on n symbols each index is represented in log2 n propositional variables and partial order constraints between symbols are modeled on the bit representations. We illustrate the application of our approach to determine LPO termination for term rewrite systems. Experimental results are unequivocal, indicating orders of magnitude speedup…
String diagrams are a powerful and intuitive graphical syntax, originated in the study of symmetric monoidal categories. In the last few years, they have found application in the modelling of various computational structures, in fields as diverse as Computer Science, Physics, Control Theory, Linguistics, and Biology. In many such proposals, the transformations of the described systems are modelled as rewrite rules of diagrams. These developments demand a mathematical foundation for string diagram rewriting: whereas rewrite theory for terms is well-understood, the two-dimensional nature of stri…
We introduce a method for proving almost sure termination in the context of lambda calculus with continuous random sampling and explicit recursion, based on ranking supermartingales. This result is extended in three ways. Antitone ranking functions have weaker restrictions on how fast they must decrease, and are applicable to a wider range of programs. Sparse ranking functions take values only at a subset of the program's reachable states, so they are simpler to define and more flexible. Ranking functions with respect to alternative reduction strategies give yet more flexibility, and significa…
We report on the automation of a technique to prove the correctness of program transformations in higher-order program calculi which may permit recursive let-bindings as they occur in functional programming languages. A program transformation is correct if it preserves the observational semantics of programs. In our LRSX Tool the so-called diagram method is automated by combining unification, matching, and reasoning on alpha-renamings on the higher-order meta-language, and automating induction proofs via an encoding into termination problems of term rewrite systems. We explain the techniques, …
We provide a computational definition of the notions of vector space and bilinear functions. We use this result to introduce a minimal language combining higher-order computation and linear algebra. This language extends the Lambda-calculus with the possibility to make arbitrary linear combinations of terms alpha.t + beta.u. We describe how to "execute" this language in terms of a few rewrite rules, and justify them through the two fundamental requirements that the language be a language of linear operators, and that it be higher-order. We mention the perspectives of this work in the field of …
