A formal treatment of the barendregt variable convention in rule inductions
Christian Urban, Michael Norrish · 2005
Barendregt’s variable convention simplifies many informal proofs in the λ-calculus by allowing the consideration of only those bound variables that have been suitably chosen. Barendregt does not give a formal justification for the variable convention, which makes it hard to formalise such informal proofs. In this paper we show how a form of the variable convention can be built into the reasoning principles for rule inductions. We give two examples explaining our technique.