Distributive ρ-calculus

AbstractThe rewriting calculus has been introduced as a general formalism that uniformly integrates rewriting and λ-calculus. In this calculus all the basic ingredients of rewriting such as rewrite rules, rule applications and results are first-class objects. The rewriting calculus has been originally designed and used for expressing the semantics of rule based as well as object oriented paradigms. We have previously shown that convergent term rewriting systems and classic strategies can be encoded naturally in the calculus.In this paper, we go a step further and we propose an extended version of the calculus that allows one to encode unrestricted term rewriting systems. This version of the calculus features a new evaluation rule describing the behavior of the result structures and a call-by-value evaluation strategy. We prove the confluence of the obtained calculus and the correctness and completeness of the proposed encoding