Abstract
Higher-order unification is the problem given an equation t = u containing free variables is there a solution substitution θ such that t θ and u θ have the same normal form? The terms t and u are from the simply typed lambda calculus and the same normal form is with respect to βη-equivalence. Higher-order matching is the particular instance when the term u is closed; can t be pattern matched to u? Although higher-order unification is undecidable, higher-order matching was conjectured to be decidable by Huet [2]. Decidability was shown in [7] via a game-theoretic analysis of β-reduction when component terms are in η-long normal form.
In the talk we outline the proof of decidability. Besides the use of games to understand β-reduction, we also emphasize how tree automata can recognize terms of simply typed lambda calculus as developed in [1, 3-6].
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Stirling, C. (2010). Introduction to Decidability of Higher-Order Matching. In: Ong, L. (eds) Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures. FoSSaCS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6014. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12032-9_1
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