Conal.Elliott@THEORY.CS.CMU.EDU (04/15/87)
Area Qualifier Talk Speaker: Conal Elliott Date: April 21 Time: 10:00-11:30 Place: WeH 7220 Topic: A Synthesis of Higher-Order Unification Program synthesis is the derivation of implementations from noneffective specifications. Higher-order unification is unification in the typed lambda calculus with alpha, beta, and eta conversion. It has been used in - program manipulation, - theorem proving in higher-order logic, - logic programming, and - mechanizing natural deduction. In this talk, we - give a new, useful conceptualization of the unification problem, - synthesize a family of ``pre-algorithms'' for unification, unifiablity, matching, matchability, with some efficiency improvements, and - present a new synthesis methodology, which may be viewed as a new interpretation, justification, and generalization of Burstall & Darlington's methodology.