Decades of work have gone into developing efficient proof calculi, data structures, algorithms, and heuristics for first-order automatic theorem proving. Higher-order provers lag behind in terms of efficiency. Instead of developing a new higher-order prover from the ground up, we propose to start with the state-of-the-art superposition-based prover E and gradually enrich it with higher-order features. We explain how to extend the prover's data structures, algorithms, and heuristics to λ-free

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... her-order logic, a formalism that supports partial application and applied variables. Our extension outperforms the traditional encoding and appears promising as a stepping stone towards full higher-order logic.