TRS

Programming languages aim to balance performance and expressive power (among many other attributes) in the context of a consistent, intuitive programming model.

Term Rewriting Turtles all the way down Language definitions are often based on significant tacit knowledge.

The Meta-Representation of Terms Earlier, we saw that a term is either a variable or a tuple <f,t1, …,tk> (for k ≥ 1) where f is a symbol and each ti is a term.

TRAM (Term Rewriting Abstract Machine) is an implementation of term rewriting systems.

TRAM.1 is an implementation of term rewriting systems. TRAM.1 is written in standard C using only a few standard libraries.

This section annotates the full source of TRAM.1 (version of Oct 2021).

Software uses memory to store data objects. An object may contain data such as strings or numbers, but it may also contain references to other nodes.

Tram does not offer built-in integers, which may seem an omission, but being unopinionated is at odds with built-in data types.

This section describes how TRAM’s scanner / parser written in C was used as a basis to implement the scanner / parser in Tram.

Section Tram – A Meta-Interpreter describes a rewrite engine on meta-terms.

In Tram.1, only the first five characters in a function name are significant (plus the fact whether they are longer or not; four in variables).

Conclusions MinimalMagic.blog/trs was created with several purposes in mind: As an informal though complete and entirely self-contained introduction to term rewriting systems.