Combinatory Reduction Systems: Introduction and Survey

Abstract Combinatory reduction systems, or CRSs for short, were designed to combine the usual first-order format of term rewriting with the presence of bound variables as in pure λ-calculus and various typed λ-calculi. Bound variables are also present in many other rewrite systems, such as systems with simplification rules for proof normalization. The original idea of CRSs is due to Aczel, who introduced a restricted class of CRSs and, under the assumption of orthogonality, proved confluence. Orthogonality means that the rules are nonambiguous (no overlap leading to a critical pair) and left-linear (no global comparison of terms necessary). We introduce the class of orthogonal CRSs, illustrated with many examples, discuss its expressive power and give an outline of a short proof of confluence. This proof is a direct generalization of Aczel's original proof, which is close to the well-known confluence proof for λ-calculus by Tait and Martin-Lof. There is a well-known connection between the parallel reduction featuring in the latter proof and the concept of “developments”, and a classical lemma in the theory of λ-calculus is that of “finite developments”, a strong normalization result. It turns out that the notion of “parallel reduction” used in Aczel's proof gives rise to a generalized form of developments which we call “superdevelopments” and on which we will briefly comment.