Conditional Term Rewriting Systems: 1st International Workshop Orsay, France, July 8-10, 1987. Proceedings

Term rewriting is a very active research topic, with its own dedicated international conference. Rewriting Techniques and Applications, that took place in 1985 at Dijon, France (L.N.C.S. 202), in 1987 at Bordeaux, France (L.N.C.S. 256), and will take place in April 1989 at Chapel Hill, USA.
Much effort has been devoted during the past few years to the study of conditional rewrite systems, a subarea of term rewriting, considered to be relatively difficult. A few of us (Nachum Dershowitz, David Plaisted, Jean-Luc R&iy and ourselves) decided to organize a workshop in July 1987 at the University of Paris-Sud at Orsay, France, in order to bring together most of the researchers involved in conditional rewriting, and to identify key problems in the field. To our surprise, some of the questions that we only intended to raise were actually answered by some of the contributed papers. And though the atmosphere was informal and lively, some exciting new results came out of the workshop from the confluence of
different approaches. Considering the excellence of the contributions, we decided on the last day of the workshop to publish the proceedings. Springer-Verlag has kindly agreed to include them in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. This volume, we think, will serve as a useful document for people working in term rewriting systems, algebraic specifications, or theorem proving. In addition to the research contributions,
short descriptions are included for the systems that were demonstrated during those fruitful days.