A fully syntactic AC-RPO

Abstract

We present the first fully syntactic (i.e., non-interpretationbased) AC-compatible recursive path ordering (RPO). It is simple, and hence easy to implement, and its behaviour is intuitive as in the standard RPO. The ordering is AC-total, and defined uniformly for both ground and non-ground terms, as well as for partial precedences. More importantly, it is the first one that can deal incrementally with partial precedences, an aspect that is essential, together with its intuitive behaviour, for interactive applications like Knuth-Bendix completion.