Cutting a Proof into Bite-Sized Chunks (Incrementally Proving Termination in Higher-Order Term Rewriting)
Cynthia Kop · Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science · 2024
This paper discusses a number of methods to prove termination of higher-order term rewriting systems, with a particular focus on large systems. In first-order term rewriting, the dependency pair framework can be used to split up a large termination problem into multiple (much) smaller components that can be solved individually. This is important because a large problem may take exponentially longer to solve in one go than solving each of its components. Unfortunately, while there are higher-order versions of several of these methods, they often fail to simplify a problem enough. Here, we will explore some of these techniques and their limitations, and discuss what else can be done to incrementally build a termination proof for higher-order systems.