Description

This textbook offers a unified, self-contained introduction to the field of term rewriting. Baader and Nipkow cover 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. They present the main algorithms both informally and as programs in the functional language Standard ML (An appendix contains a quick and easy introduction to ML). Key chapters cover crucial algorithms such as unification and congruence closure in more depth and develop efficient Pascal programs. The book contains many examples and over 170 exercises. This is also an ideal reference book for professional researchers: results spread over many conference and journal articles are collected here in a unified notation, detailed proofs of almost all theorems are provided, and each chapter closes with a guide to the literature.