Narrowing Trees for Syntactically Deterministic Conditional Term Rewriting Systems

A narrowing tree for a constructor term rewriting system and a pair of terms is a finite representation for the space of all possible innermost-narrowing derivations that start with the pair and end with non-narrowable terms. Narrowing trees have grammar representations that can be considered regular tree grammars. Innermost narrowing is a counterpart of constructor-based rewriting, and thus, narrowing trees can be used in analyzing constructor-based rewriting to normal forms. In this paper, using grammar representations, we extend narrowing trees to syntactically deterministic conditional term rewriting systems that are constructor systems. We show that narrowing trees are useful to prove two properties of a normal conditional term rewriting system: one is infeasibility of conditional critical pairs and the other is quasi-reducibility

Sequentiality in orthogonal term rewriting systems

AbstractFor orthogonal term rewriting systems Q. Huet and J.-J. Lévy have introduced the property of ‘strong sequentiality’. A strongly sequential orthogonal term rewriting system admits an efficiently computable normalizing one-step reduction strategy. As shown by Huet and Lévy, strong sequentiality is a decidable property. In this paper we present an alternative analysis of strongly sequential term rewriting systems, leading to two simplified proofs of the decidability of this property. We also compare some related notions of sequentiality that recently have been proposed

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

Improved Functional Flow and Reachability Analyses Using Indexed Linear Tree Grammars

The collecting semantics of a program defines the strongest static property of interest. We study the analysis of the collecting semantics of higher-order functional programs, cast as left-linear term rewriting systems. The analysis generalises functional flow analysis and the reachability problem for term rewriting systems, which are both undecidable. We present an algorithm that uses indexed linear tree grammars (ILTGs) both to describe the input set and compute the set that approximates the collecting semantics. ILTGs are equi-expressive with pushdown tree automata, and so, strictly more expressive than regular tree grammars. Our result can be seen as a refinement of Jones and Andersen\u27s procedure, which uses regular tree grammars. The main technical innovation of our algorithm is the use of indices to capture (sets of) substitutions, thus enabling a more precise binding analysis than afforded by regular grammars. We give a simple proof of termination and soundness, and demonstrate that our method is more accurate than other approaches to functional flow and reachability analyses in the literature

A Computational Interpretation of Context-Free Expressions

We phrase parsing with context-free expressions as a type inhabitation problem where values are parse trees and types are context-free expressions. We first show how containment among context-free and regular expressions can be reduced to a reachability problem by using a canonical representation of states. The proofs-as-programs principle yields a computational interpretation of the reachability problem in terms of a coercion that transforms the parse tree for a context-free expression into a parse tree for a regular expression. It also yields a partial coercion from regular parse trees to context-free ones. The partial coercion from the trivial language of all words to a context-free expression corresponds to a predictive parser for the expression

Completeness of Tree Automata Completion

We consider rewriting of a regular language with a left-linear term rewriting system. We show a completeness theorem on equational tree automata completion stating that, if there exists a regular over-approximation of the set of reachable terms, then equational completion can compute it (or safely under-approximate it). A nice corollary of this theorem is that, if the set of reachable terms is regular, then equational completion can also compute it. This was known to be true for some term rewriting system classes preserving regularity, but was still an open question in the general case. The proof is not constructive because it depends on the regularity of the set of reachable terms, which is undecidable. To carry out those proofs we generalize and improve two results of completion: the Termination and the Upper-Bound theorems. Those theoretical results provide an algorithmic way to safely explore regular approximations with completion. This has been implemented in Timbuk and used to verify safety properties, automatically and efficiently, on first-order and higher-order functional programs

Finding The Lazy Programmer's Bugs

Traditionally developers and testers created huge numbers of explicit tests, enumerating interesting cases, perhaps biased by what they believe to be the current boundary conditions of the function being tested. Or at least, they were supposed to. A major step forward was the development of property testing. Property testing requires the user to write a few functional properties that are used to generate tests, and requires an external library or tool to create test data for the tests. As such many thousands of tests can be created for a single property. For the purely functional programming language Haskell there are several such libraries; for example QuickCheck [CH00], SmallCheck and Lazy SmallCheck [RNL08]. Unfortunately, property testing still requires the user to write explicit tests. Fortunately, we note there are already many implicit tests present in programs. Developers may throw assertion errors, or the compiler may silently insert runtime exceptions for incomplete pattern matches. We attempt to automate the testing process using these implicit tests. Our contributions are in four main areas: (1) We have developed algorithms to automatically infer appropriate constructors and functions needed to generate test data without requiring additional programmer work or annotations. (2) To combine the constructors and functions into test expressions we take advantage of Haskell's lazy evaluation semantics by applying the techniques of needed narrowing and lazy instantiation to guide generation. (3) We keep the type of test data at its most general, in order to prevent committing too early to monomorphic types that cause needless wasted tests. (4) We have developed novel ways of creating Haskell case expressions to inspect elements inside returned data structures, in order to discover exceptions that may be hidden by laziness, and to make our test data generation algorithm more expressive. In order to validate our claims, we have implemented these techniques in Irulan, a fully automatic tool for generating systematic black-box unit tests for Haskell library code. We have designed Irulan to generate high coverage test suites and detect common programming errors in the process