Computing More Specific Versions of Conditional Rewriting Systems

Rewrite systems obtained by some automated transformation often have a poor syntactic structure even if they have good properties from a semantic point of view. For instance, a rewrite system might have overlapping left-hand sides even if it can only produce at most one constructor normal form (i.e., value). In this paper, we propose a method for computing “more specific” versions of deterministic conditional rewrite systems (i.e., typical functional programs) by replacing a given rule (e.g., an overlapping rule) with a finite set of instances of this rule. In some cases, the technique is able to produce a non-overlapping system from an overlapping one. We have applied the transformation to improve the systems produced by a previous technique for function inversion with encouraging results (all the overlapping systems were successfully transformed to non-overlapping systems).