Selected papers of the joint 26th International Conference on "Rewriting Techniques and Applications" and 13th International Conference on "Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications" RTA/TLCA 2015

Editors: Thorsten Altenkirch, Maribel Fernández


1. Termination of Cycle Rewriting by Transformation and Matrix Interpretation

David Sabel ; Hans Zantema.
We present techniques to prove termination of cycle rewriting, that is, string rewriting on cycles, which are strings in which the start and end are connected. Our main technique is to transform cycle rewriting into string rewriting and then apply state of the art techniques to prove termination of the string rewrite system. We present three such transformations, and prove for all of them that they are sound and complete. In this way not only termination of string rewriting of the transformed system implies termination of the original cycle rewrite system, a similar conclusion can be drawn for non-termination. Apart from this transformational approach, we present a uniform framework of matrix interpretations, covering most of the earlier approaches to automatically proving termination of cycle rewriting. All our techniques serve both for proving termination and relative termination. We present several experiments showing the power of our techniques.

2. Reachability Analysis of Innermost Rewriting

Thomas Genet ; Yann Salmon.
We consider the problem of inferring a grammar describing the output of a functional program given a grammar describing its input. Solutions to this problem are helpful for detecting bugs or proving safety properties of functional programs, and several rewriting tools exist for solving this problem. However, known grammar inference techniques are not able to take evaluation strategies of the program into account. This yields very imprecise results when the evaluation strategy matters. In this work, we adapt the Tree Automata Completion algorithm to approximate accurately the set of terms reachable by rewriting under the innermost strategy. We formally prove that the proposed technique is sound and precise w.r.t. innermost rewriting. We show that those results can be extended to the leftmost and rightmost innermost case. The algorithms for the general innermost case have been implemented in the Timbuk reachability tool. Experiments show that it noticeably improves the accuracy of static analysis for functional programs using the call-by-value evaluation strategy.

3. Extending Unification in $\mathcal{EL}$ to Disunification: The Case of Dismatching and Local Disunification

Franz Baader ; Stefan Borgwardt ; Barbara Morawska.
Unification in Description Logics has been introduced as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. We try to extend the known decidability results for unification in the Description Logic $\mathcal{EL}$ to disunification since negative constraints can be used to avoid unwanted unifiers. While decidability of the solvability of general $\mathcal{EL}$-disunification problems remains an open problem, we obtain NP-completeness results for two interesting special cases: dismatching problems, where one side of each negative constraint must be ground, and local solvability of disunification problems, where we consider only solutions that are constructed from terms occurring in the input problem. More precisely, we first show that dismatching can be reduced to local disunification, and then provide two complementary NP-algorithms for finding local solutions of disunification problems.

4. On linear rewriting systems for Boolean logic and some applications to proof theory

Anupam Das ; Lutz Straßburger.
Linear rules have played an increasing role in structural proof theory in recent years. It has been observed that the set of all sound linear inference rules in Boolean logic is already coNP-complete, i.e. that every Boolean tautology can be written as a (left- and right-)linear rewrite rule. In this paper we study properties of systems consisting only of linear inferences. Our main result is that the length of any 'nontrivial' derivation in such a system is bound by a polynomial. As a consequence there is no polynomial-time decidable sound and complete system of linear inferences, unless coNP=NP. We draw tools and concepts from term rewriting, Boolean function theory and graph theory in order to access some required intermediate results. At the same time we make several connections between these areas that, to our knowledge, have not yet been presented and constitute a rich theoretical framework for reasoning about linear TRSs for Boolean logic.

5. Certifying Confluence Proofs via Relative Termination and Rule Labeling

Julian Nagele ; Bertram Felgenhauer ; Harald Zankl.
The rule labeling heuristic aims to establish confluence of (left-)linear term rewrite systems via decreasing diagrams. We present a formalization of a confluence criterion based on the interplay of relative termination and the rule labeling in the theorem prover Isabelle. Moreover, we report on the integration of this result into the certifier CeTA, facilitating the checking of confluence certificates based on decreasing diagrams. The power of the method is illustrated by an experimental evaluation on a (standard) collection of confluence problems.

6. Coherent Presentations of Monoidal Categories

Pierre-Louis Curien ; Samuel Mimram.
Presentations of categories are a well-known algebraic tool to provide descriptions of categories by means of generators, for objects and morphisms, and relations on morphisms. We generalize here this notion, in order to consider situations where the objects are considered modulo an equivalence relation, which is described by equational generators. When those form a convergent (abstract) rewriting system on objects, there are three very natural constructions that can be used to define the category which is described by the presentation: one consists in turning equational generators into identities (i.e. considering a quotient category), one consists in formally adding inverses to equational generators (i.e. localizing the category), and one consists in restricting to objects which are normal forms. We show that, under suitable coherence conditions on the presentation, the three constructions coincide, thus generalizing celebrated results on presentations of groups, and we extend those conditions to presentations of monoidal categories.

7. Faithful (meta-)encodings of programmable strategies into term rewriting systems

Horatiu Cirstea ; Serguei Lenglet ; Pierre-Etienne Moreau.
Rewriting is a formalism widely used in computer science and mathematical logic. When using rewriting as a programming or modeling paradigm, the rewrite rules describe the transformations one wants to operate and rewriting strategies are used to con- trol their application. The operational semantics of these strategies are generally accepted and approaches for analyzing the termination of specific strategies have been studied. We propose in this paper a generic encoding of classic control and traversal strategies used in rewrite based languages such as Maude, Stratego and Tom into a plain term rewriting system. The encoding is proven sound and complete and, as a direct consequence, estab- lished termination methods used for term rewriting systems can be applied to analyze the termination of strategy controlled term rewriting systems. We show that the encoding of strategies into term rewriting systems can be easily adapted to handle many-sorted signa- tures and we use a meta-level representation of terms to reduce the size of the encodings. The corresponding implementation in Tom generates term rewriting systems compatible with the syntax of termination tools such as AProVE and TTT2, tools which turned out to be very effective in (dis)proving the termination of the generated term rewriting systems. The approach can also be seen as a generic strategy compiler which can be integrated into languages providing pattern matching primitives; experiments in Tom show that applying our […]

8. Multiplicative-Additive Proof Equivalence is Logspace-complete, via Binary Decision Trees

Marc Bagnol.
Given a logic presented in a sequent calculus, a natural question is that of equivalence of proofs: to determine whether two given proofs are equated by any denotational semantics, ie any categorical interpretation of the logic compatible with its cut-elimination procedure. This notion can usually be captured syntactically by a set of rule permutations. Very generally, proofnets can be defined as combinatorial objects which provide canonical representatives of equivalence classes of proofs. In particular, the existence of proof nets for a logic provides a solution to the equivalence problem of this logic. In certain fragments of linear logic, it is possible to give a notion of proofnet with good computational properties, making it a suitable representation of proofs for studying the cut-elimination procedure, among other things. It has recently been proved that there cannot be such a notion of proofnets for the multiplicative (with units) fragment of linear logic, due to the equivalence problem for this logic being Pspace-complete. We investigate the multiplicative-additive (without unit) fragment of linear logic and show it is closely related to binary decision trees: we build a representation of proofs based on binary decision trees, reducing proof equivalence to decision tree equivalence, and give a converse encoding of binary decision trees as proofs. We get as our main result that the complexity of the proof equivalence problem of the studied fragment is […]

9. Undecidability of Equality in the Free Locally Cartesian Closed Category (Extended version)

Simon Castellan ; Pierre Clairambault ; Peter Dybjer.
We show that a version of Martin-Löf type theory with an extensional identity type former I, a unit type N1 , Sigma-types, Pi-types, and a base type is a free category with families (supporting these type formers) both in a 1- and a 2-categorical sense. It follows that the underlying category of contexts is a free locally cartesian closed category in a 2-categorical sense because of a previously proved biequivalence. We show that equality in this category is undecidable by reducing it to the undecidability of convertibility in combinatory logic. Essentially the same construction also shows a slightly strengthened form of the result that equality in extensional Martin-Löf type theory with one universe is undecidable.

10. Matching Logic

Grigore Rosu.
This paper presents matching logic, a first-order logic (FOL) variant for specifying and reasoning about structure by means of patterns and pattern matching. Its sentences, the patterns, are constructed using variables, symbols, connectives and quantifiers, but no difference is made between function and predicate symbols. In models, a pattern evaluates into a power-set domain (the set of values that match it), in contrast to FOL where functions and predicates map into a regular domain. Matching logic uniformly generalizes several logical frameworks important for program analysis, such as: propositional logic, algebraic specification, FOL with equality, modal logic, and separation logic. Patterns can specify separation requirements at any level in any program configuration, not only in the heaps or stores, without any special logical constructs for that: the very nature of pattern matching is that if two structures are matched as part of a pattern, then they can only be spatially separated. Like FOL, matching logic can also be translated into pure predicate logic with equality, at the same time admitting its own sound and complete proof system. A practical aspect of matching logic is that FOL reasoning with equality remains sound, so off-the-shelf provers and SMT solvers can be used for matching logic reasoning. Matching logic is particularly well-suited for reasoning about programs in programming languages that have an operational semantics, but it is not limited to this.

11. Standardization and Conservativity of a Refined Call-by-Value lambda-Calculus

Giulio Guerrieri ; Luca Paolini ; Simona Ronchi Della Rocca.
We study an extension of Plotkin's call-by-value lambda-calculus via two commutation rules (sigma-reductions). These commutation rules are sufficient to remove harmful call-by-value normal forms from the calculus, so that it enjoys elegant characterizations of many semantic properties. We prove that this extended calculus is a conservative refinement of Plotkin's one. In particular, the notions of solvability and potential valuability for this calculus coincide with those for Plotkin's call-by-value lambda-calculus. The proof rests on a standardization theorem proved by generalizing Takahashi's approach of parallel reductions to our set of reduction rules. The standardization is weak (i.e. redexes are not fully sequentialized) because of overlapping interferences between reductions.

12. Coinductive Foundations of Infinitary Rewriting and Infinitary Equational Logic

Jörg Endrullis ; Helle Hvid Hansen ; Dimitri Hendriks ; Andrew Polonsky ; Alexandra Silva.
We present a coinductive framework for defining and reasoning about the infinitary analogues of equational logic and term rewriting in a uniform, coinductive way. The setup captures rewrite sequences of arbitrary ordinal length, but it has neither the need for ordinals nor for metric convergence. This makes the framework especially suitable for formalizations in theorem provers.

13. Logical relations for coherence of effect subtyping

Dariusz Biernacki ; Piotr Polesiuk.
A coercion semantics of a programming language with subtyping is typically defined on typing derivations rather than on typing judgments. To avoid semantic ambiguity, such a semantics is expected to be coherent, i.e., independent of the typing derivation for a given typing judgment. In this article we present heterogeneous, biorthogonal, step-indexed logical relations for establishing the coherence of coercion semantics of programming languages with subtyping. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proof method, we develop a proof of coherence of a type-directed, selective CPS translation from a typed call-by-value lambda calculus with delimited continuations and control-effect subtyping. The article is accompanied by a Coq formalization that relies on a novel shallow embedding of a logic for reasoning about step-indexing.

14. Mixin Composition Synthesis based on Intersection Types

Jan Bessai ; Tzu-Chun Chen ; Andrej Dudenhefner ; Boris Düdder ; Ugo de'Liguoro ; Jakob Rehof.
We present a method for synthesizing compositions of mixins using type inhabitation in intersection types. First, recursively defined classes and mixins, which are functions over classes, are expressed as terms in a lambda calculus with records. Intersection types with records and record-merge are used to assign meaningful types to these terms without resorting to recursive types. Second, typed terms are translated to a repository of typed combinators. We show a relation between record types with record-merge and intersection types with constructors. This relation is used to prove soundness and partial completeness of the translation with respect to mixin composition synthesis. Furthermore, we demonstrate how a translated repository and goal type can be used as input to an existing framework for composition synthesis in bounded combinatory logic via type inhabitation. The computed result is a class typed by the goal type and generated by a mixin composition applied to an existing class.