A conservative look at term deduction systems with variable binding
Wan J. Fokkink, Chris Verhoef · TU/e Research Portal · 1995
We set up a formal framework to describe term deduction systems, such as transition system speci cations in the style of Plotkin, and conditional term rewriting systems. This framework has the power to express many-sortedness, general binding mechanisms and substitutions, among other notions such as negative premises and unary predicates on terms. The framework is used to present a conservativity format in operational semantics, which states sufficient criteria to ensure that the extension of a transition system specification with new rules does not affect the behaviour of the original terms. Furthermore, we showhowgeneral theorems in structured operational semantics can be transformed into results in conditional term rewriting. We apply this approach to the conservativity theorem, which yields a result that is useful in the field of abstract data types.