TERSE: A Visual Environment for Supporting Analysis, Verification and Transformation of Term Rewriting Systems

Term rewriting systems(TRS)[1] can be widely applicable in many areas of computer science such as equational logics, theorem proving, algebraic speci cation, program veri cation, transformation and synthesis, etc. In such applications, an environment for term rewriting with user friendly graphical interface is strongly required for analyzing structure of terms and rewriting processes. Most TRS implementations developed so far[3, 4] are text-based ones, and hence they do not provide the su cient supports for analyzing structure of terms nor rewriting sequences. We have developed a visual environment for term rewriting computation. The environment (TERSE:TErm Rewriting Support Environment) provides various kinds of visualization to support analysis, veri cation and transformation of TRS. Currently, ve sorts of visual viewers are implemented in TERSE. Several kinds of automated termination proof and transformation algorithms are also included in the environment. TERSE is implemented with CML(Concurrent ML[5]) with eXene[6] library. Using higher order features in CML makes it easy to modify and extend the environment.