From Conditional to Unconditional Rewriting

Abstract. An automated technique to translate conditional rewrite rules into unconditional ones is presented, which is suitable to implement, or compile, conditional rewriting on top of much simpler and easier to optimize unconditional rewrite systems. An experiment performed on world’s fastest conditional rewriting engines shows that speedups for conditional rewriting of an order of magnitude can already be obtained by applying the presented technique as a front-end transformation.