Term rewriting systems developed out of mathematical logic and are an important part of theoretical computer science. They consist of sequences of discrete transformation steps where one term is replaced with another and have applications in many areas, from functional programming to automatic theorem proving and computer algebra. This 2003 book starts at an elementary level with the earlier chapters providing a foundation for the rest of the work. Much of the advanced material appeared here for the first time in book form. Subjects treated include orthogonality, termination, completion, lambda calculus, higher-order rewriting, infinitary rewriting and term graph rewriting. Many exercises are included with selected solutions provided on the web. A comprehensive bibliography makes this book ideal both for teaching and research. A chapter is included presenting applications of term rewriting systems, with many pointers to actual implementations.

Unified and self-contained introduction to term-rewriting; suited for students or professionals.

Unlike current survey articles and textbooks, here the so-called confluence and termination hierarchies play a key role. Throughout, the relationships between the properties in the hierarchies are reviewed, and it is shown that for every implication X => Y in the hierarchies, the property X is undecidable for all term rewriting systems satisfying Y. Topics covered include: the newest techniques for proving termination of rewrite systems; a comprehensive chapter on conditional term rewriting systems; a state-of-the-art survey of modularity in term rewriting, and a uniform framework for term and graph rewriting, as well as the first result on conditional graph rewriting.

The 18th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, held in Paris, France in June 2007, featured presentations and discussions centering on some of the latest advances in the field. This volume presents the proceedings from that meeting. Papers cover current research on all aspects of rewriting, including applications, foundational issues, frameworks, implementations, and semantics.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA2005),whichwasheldonApril19– 21, 2005, at the Nara-Ken New Public Hall in the center of the Nara National Park in Nara, Japan. RTA is the major forum for the presentation of research on all aspects of rewriting.PreviousRTAconferenceswereheldinDijon(1985),Bordeaux(1987), Chapel Hill (1989), Como (1991), Montreal (1993), Kaiserslautern (1995), Rutgers (1996), Sitges (1997), Tsukuba (1998), Trento (1999), Norwich (2000), Utrecht (2001), Copenhagen (2002), Valencia (2003), and Aachen (2004). This year, there were 79 submissions from 20 countries, of which 31 papers were accepted for publication (29 regular papers and 2 system descriptions). The submissions came from France (10 accepted papers of the 23.1 submitted papers), USA (5.6 of 11.7), Japan (4 of 9), Spain (2.7 of 6.5), UK (2.7 of 4.7), The Netherlands (1.7 of 3.8), Germany (1.3 of 2.3), Austria (1 of 1), Poland (1 of 1), Israel (0.5 of 0.8), Denmark (0.5 of 0.5), China (0 of 4), Korea (0 of 4), Taiwan (0 of 1.3), Australia (0 of 1), Brazil (0 of 1), Russia (0 of 1), Switzerland (0 of 1), Sweden (0 of 1), and Italy (0 of 0.3). Each submission was assigned to at least three Program Committee m- bers, who carefully reviewed the papers, with the help of 111 external referees.

This textbook offers a unified and self-contained introduction to the field of term rewriting. It covers all the basic material (abstract reduction systems, termination, confluence, completion, and combination problems), but also some important and closely connected subjects: universal algebra, unification theory, Gröbner bases and Buchberger's algorithm. The main algorithms are presented both informally and as programs in the functional language Standard ML (an appendix contains a quick and easy introduction to ML). Certain crucial algorithms like unification and congruence closure are covered in more depth and Pascal programs are developed. The book contains many examples and over 170 exercises. This text is also an ideal reference book for professional researchers: results that have been spread over many conference and journal articles are collected together in a unified notation, proofs of almost all theorems are provided, and each chapter closes with a guide to the literature.

This volume contains thoroughly revised versions of the contributions presented at the French Spring School of Theoretical Computer Science, held in Font Romeu, France in May 1993. This seminar was devoted to rewriting in a broad sense, as rewriting is now an important discipline, relating to many other areas such as formal languages, models of concurrency, tree automata, functional programming languages, constraints, symbolic computation, and automated deduction. The book includes a number of surveys contributed by senior researchers as well as a few papers presenting original research of relevance for the broader theoretical computer science community.

This volume contains the papers preesented at the Third International Workshop on Conditional Term Rewriting Systems, held in Pont- -Mousson, France, July 8-10, 1992. Topics covered include conditional rewriting and its applications to programming languages, specification languages, automated deduction, constrained rewriting, typed rewriting, higher-order rewriting, and graph rewriting. The volume contains 40 papers, including four invited talks: Algebraic semantics of rewriting terms and types, by K. Meinke; Generic induction proofs, by P. Padawitz; Conditional term rewriting and first-order theorem proving, by D. Plaisted; and Decidability of finiteness properties (abstract), by L. Pacholski. The first CTRS workshop was held at the University of Paris in 1987 and the second at Concordia University, Montreal, in 1990. Their proceddings are published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volumes 308 and 516 respectively.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2006, held in Seattle, WA, USA in August 2006. The book presents 23 revised full papers and 4 systems description papers together with 2 invited talks and a plenary talk of the hosting FLoC conference. Topics include equational reasoning, system verification, lambda calculus, theorem proving, system descriptions, termination, higher-order rewriting and unification, and more.

This book presents a collection of revised refereed papers selected from the presentations accepted for the Second International Workshop on Higher-Order Algebra, Logic, and Term Rewriting, HOA '95, held in Paderborn, Germany, in September 1995. The 14 research papers included, together with an invited paper by Jan Willem Klop, report state-of-the-art results; the relevant theoretical aspects are addressed, and in addition existing proof systems and term rewriting systems are discussed.