Programming Research Group Technical Report TR-8-93

An implementation of higher-order rewriting (Extended abstract)

D A Wolfram

June 1993, 4pp.

We discuss an implementation of a restricted form of higher-order rewriting. It is illustrated with encodings of programs that have been derived using the functional form of the Bird-Meertens Formalism. The implementation allows "leftmost-outermost" and "rightmost-innermost" rewriting orders to be selected, and conditional higher-order rewrite rules to be used. The results are encouraging and suggest that systems which use rewrite rules can achieve greater conciseness, applicability, and efficiency.


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