A book on equational rewriting

[Brian Rice]

>As lately much work over Arrow concerns about
>equational rewriting, I lately found a book that
>seems interesting. It is titled "Solving higher order
>equations: from logic to programming" (Christian
>Prehofer, Birkhauser ed.), and puts
>some theoretical foundations in equational reasoning
>and term rewriting for higher order equations. The
>purpose is that of introducing the benefits of higher
>order programming in logic languages.
>The book is compact, about 160 pages plus
>bibliography, but it has not a reference implemen-
>tation. Anyway, I knew about to this
>book while surfing on the site of Curry
>(http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~curry/), a
>functional-logic language which has many
>implementation, notably a Curry2java one.
>The book requires some background; there
>is an introductory chapter covering typed
>lambda calculus and substitution, but it is
>very succint. I don't think that it will be a
>problem for the most part of the people
>reading this mailing list... but it still is for me,
>so I am not able to express an opinion on
>the book. On the Birkhauser site you can
>find the TOC of the book.

Yeah, I got that book. It has **on average** about 10 lambda symbols 
per page. :)

So it's very much a theory-oriented book, the hard-core theoretical 
computer scientist would love it, but most would find it too formal 
and abstract. On the other hand, it does cover higher-order narrowing 
quite well, including lazy implementations of such. There is really 
no actual code at all, save for lambda-calculus notations and a very 
simple functional/logic programming language pseudo-code. Your own 
review really does give the right idea about it, though.

>Pietro

Thanks, I should sometime detail my entire library that I've 
accumulated (another reason I need to start a business - to write off 
my extensive book and software purchases against my annual income 
taxes as business research expenses).
~