Practical Higher-Order Pattern Unification with On-the-Fly Raising [chapter]

Gopalan Nadathur, Natalie Linnell
2005 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Higher-order pattern unification problems arise often in computations carried out within systems such as Twelf, λProlog and Isabelle. An important characteristic of such problems is that they are given by equations appearing under a prefix of alternating universal and existential quantifiers. Existing algorithms for solving these problems assume that such prefixes are simplified to a ∀∃∀ form by an a priori application of a transformation known as raising. There are drawbacks to this approach.
more » ... ixed quantifier prefixes typically manifest themselves in the course of computation, thereby requiring a dynamic form of preprocessing that is difficult to support in low-level implementations. Moreover, raising may be redundant in many cases and its effect may have to be undone by a subsequent pruning transformation. We propose a method to overcome these difficulties. In particular, a unification algorithm is described that proceeds by recursively descending through the structures of terms, performing raising and other transformations on-the-fly and only as needed. This algorithm also exploits an explicit substitution notation for lambda terms.
doi:10.1007/11562931_28 fatcat:6tr7ribftjb4ppsvtfxsf4zvbq