Theory and applications of term graph rewriting: introduction
Ian Mackie, Detlef Plump · Mathematical Structures in Computer Science · 2007
Term graph rewriting is concerned with the representation of functional expressions as graphs and the evaluation of these expressions by rule-based graph transformation. The advantage of computing with graphs rather than terms is that common subexpressions can be shared, improving the efficiency of computations in space and time. Sharing is ubiquitous in implementations of programming languages: many functional, logic, object-oriented and concurrent calculi are implemented using term graphs.