Constructor rewriting systems are said to be cons-free if, roughly, constructor terms in the righthand sides of rules are subterms of constructor terms in the left-hand side; the computational intuition is that rules cannot build new data structures. It is well-known that cons-free programming languages can be used to characterize computational complexity classes, and that cons-free first-order...

Non-confluent and non-terminating constructor-based term rewriting systems are useful for the purpose of specification and programming. In particular, existing functional logic languages use such kind of rewrite systems to define possibly non-strict non-deterministic functions. The semantics adopted for non-determinism is call-time choice, whose combination with non-strictness is a non trivial ...

A reachability problem is a problem used to decide whether s is reachable to t by R or not for a given two terms s, t and a term rewriting system R. Since it is known that this problem is undecidable, effort has been devoted to finding subclasses of term rewriting systems in which the reachability is decidable. However few works on decidability exist for innermost reduction strategy or context-...

In this paper we present a novel condensed narrowing-like semantics that contains the minimal information which is needed to describe compositionally all possible rewritings of a term rewriting system. We provide its goal-dependent top-down definition and, more importantly, an equivalent goal-independent bottom-up fixpoint characterization. We prove soundness and completeness w.r.t. the small-s...