Term Rewriting and All That

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

Franz Baader (Author), Tobias Nipkow (Author)

9780521779203, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 August 1999

316 pages, 170 exercises
24.2 x 17 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'… a highly welcome addition to the literature on term rewriting … It is very readable, well written and likeable book. it should be of great value to students and researchers alike.' Jan Willem Klop, Journal of Functioning Programming

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.

Preface
1. Motivating examples
2. Abstract reduction systems
3. Universal algebra
4. Equational problems
5. Termination
6. Confluence
7. Completion
8. Gröbner bases and Buchberger's algorithm
9. Combination problems
10. Equational unification
11. Extensions
Appendix 1. Ordered sets
Appendix 2. A bluffer's guide to ML
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Mathematical theory of computation [UYA], Algorithms & data structures [UMB]