Counting Environments and Closures

Environments and closures are two of the main ingredients of evaluation in lambda-calculus. A closure is a pair consisting of a lambda-term and an environment, whereas an environment is a list of lambda-terms assigned to free variables. In this paper we investigate some dynamic aspects of evaluation in lambda-calculus considering the quantitative, combinatorial properties of environments and closures. Focusing on two classes of environments and closures, namely the so-called plain and closed ones, we consider the problem of their asymptotic counting and effective random generation. We provide an asymptotic approximation of the number of both plain environments and closures of size n. Using the associated generating functions, we construct effective samplers for both classes of combinatorial structures. Finally, we discuss the related problem of asymptotic counting and random generation of closed environments and closures

Nominal Narrowing

Nominal unification is a generalisation of first-order unification that takes alpha-equivalence into account. In this paper, we study nominal unification in the context of equational theories. We introduce nominal narrowing and design a general nominal E-unification procedure, which is sound and complete for a wide class of equational theories. We give examples of application

Sparse Tiling Through Overlap Closures for Termination of String Rewriting

A strictly locally testable language is characterized by its set of admissible factors, prefixes and suffixes, called tiles. We over-approximate reachability sets in string rewriting by languages defined by sparse sets of tiles, containing only those that are reachable in derivations. Using the partial algebra defined by a tiling for semantic labeling, we obtain a transformational method for proving local termination. These algebras can be represented efficiently as finite automata of a certain shape. Using a known result on forward closures, and a new characterisation of overlap closures, we can automatically prove termination and relative termination, respectively. We report on experiments showing the strength of the method

Two Decreasing Measures for Simply Typed ?-Terms

This paper defines two decreasing measures for terms of the simply typed ?-calculus, called the ?-measure and the ?^{?}-measure. A decreasing measure is a function that maps each typable ?-term to an element of a well-founded ordering, in such a way that contracting any ?-redex decreases the value of the function, entailing strong normalization. Both measures are defined constructively, relying on an auxiliary calculus, a non-erasing variant of the ?-calculus. In this system, dubbed the ?^{?}-calculus, each ?-step creates a "wrapper" containing a copy of the argument that cannot be erased and cannot interact with the context in any other way. Both measures rely crucially on the observation, known to Turing and Prawitz, that contracting a redex cannot create redexes of higher degree, where the degree of a redex is defined as the height of the type of its ?-abstraction. The ?-measure maps each ?-term to a natural number, and it is obtained by evaluating the term in the ?^{?}-calculus and counting the number of remaining wrappers. The ?^{?}-measure maps each ?-term to a structure of nested multisets, where the nesting depth is proportional to the maximum redex degree

The Expressive Power of One Variable Used Once: The Chomsky Hierarchy and First-Order Monadic Constructor Rewriting

We study the implicit computational complexity of constructor term rewriting systems where every function and constructor symbol is unary or nullary. Surprisingly, adding simple and natural constraints to rule formation yields classes of systems that accept exactly the four classes of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy

Certifying Higher-Order Polynomial Interpretations

Higher-order rewriting is a framework in which one can write higher-order programs and study their properties. One such property is termination: the situation that for all inputs, the program eventually halts its execution and produces an output. Several tools have been developed to check whether higher-order rewriting systems are terminating. However, developing such tools is difficult and can be error-prone. In this paper, we present a way of certifying termination proofs of higher-order term rewriting systems. We formalize a specific method that is used to prove termination, namely the polynomial interpretation method. In addition, we give a program that processes proof traces containing a high-level description of a termination proof into a formal Coq proof script that can be checked by Coq. We demonstrate the usability of this approach by certifying higher-order polynomial interpretation proofs produced by Wanda, a termination analysis tool for higher-order rewriting

Categorical Coherence from Term Rewriting Systems

International audienceThe celebrated Squier theorem allows to prove coherence properties of algebraic structures, such as MacLane’s coherence theorem for monoidal categories, based on rewriting techniques. We are interested here in extending the theory and associated tools simultaneously in two directions. Firstly, we want to take in account situations where coherence is partial, in the sense that it only applies for a subset of structural morphisms (for instance, in the case of the coherence theorem for symmetric monoidal categories, we do not want to strictify the symmetry). Secondly, we are interested in structures where variables can be duplicated or erased. We develop theorems and rewriting techniques in order to achieve this, first in the setting of abstract rewriting systems, and then extend them to term rewriting systems, suitably generalized in order to take coherence in account. As an illustration of our results, we explain how to recover the coherence theorems for monoidal and symmetric monoidal categories

Coherence of Gray Categories via Rewriting

Over the recent years, the theory of rewriting has been extended in order to provide systematic techniques to show coherence results for strict higher categories. Here, we investigate a further generalization to low-dimensional weak categories, and consider in details the first non-trivial case: presentations of tricategories. By a general result, those are equivalent to the stricter Gray categories, for which we introduce a notion of rewriting system, as well as associated tools: critical pairs, termination orders, etc. We show that a finite rewriting system admits a finite number of critical pairs and, as a variant of Newman\u27s lemma in our context, that a convergent rewriting system is coherent, meaning that two parallel 3-cells are necessarily equal. This is illustrated on rewriting systems corresponding to various well-known structures in the context of Gray categories (monoids, adjunctions, Frobenius monoids). Finally, we discuss generalizations in arbitrary dimension

Decreasing diagrams with two labels are complete for confluence of countable systems

Like termination, confluence is a central property of rewrite systems. Unlike for termination, however, there exists no known complexity hierarchy for confluence. In this paper we investigate whether the decreasing diagrams technique can be used to obtain such a hierarchy. The decreasing diagrams technique is one of the strongest and most versatile methods for proving confluence of abstract reduction systems, it is complete for countable systems, and it has many well-known confluence criteria as corollaries. So what makes decreasing diagrams so powerful? In contrast to other confluence techniques, decreasing diagrams employ a labelling of the steps ? with labels from a well-founded order in order to conclude confluence of the underlying unlabelled relation. Hence it is natural to ask how the size of the label set influences the strength of the technique. In particular, what class of abstract reduction systems can be proven confluent using decreasing diagrams restricted to 1 label, 2 labels, 3 labels, and so on? Surprisingly, we find that two labels su ce for proving confluence for every abstract rewrite system having the cofinality property, thus in particular for every confluent, countable system. We also show that this result stands in sharp contrast to the situation for commutation of rewrite relations, where the hierarchy does not collapse. Finally, as a background theme, we discuss the logical issue of first-order definability of the notion of confluence