Essentially, in a reversible programming language, for each forward
computation from state S to state S′, there exists a constructive method to
go backwards from state S′ to state S. Besides its theoretical interest,
reversible computation is a fundamental concept which is relevant in many
different areas like cellular automata, bidirectional program transformation,
or quantum computing, to name a few.
In this work, we focus on term rewriting, a computation model that underlies
most rule-based programming languages. In general, term rewriting is not
reversible, even for injective functions; namely, given a rewrite step t1→t2, we do not always have a decidable method to get t1 from
t2. Here, we introduce a conservative extension of term rewriting that
becomes reversible. Furthermore, we also define two transformations,
injectivization and inversion, to make a rewrite system reversible using
standard term rewriting. We illustrate the usefulness of our transformations in
the context of bidirectional program transformation.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in
Programmin