Talk:Confluence (term rewriting)

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[edit] suggestion

IMHO the motivating example given in the article is not term rewriting. A better example would be

(11+9) \times 2 + (11+9) \times 4

versus

11 \times (2+4) + 9 \times (2+4)

Please change if you agree.

91.23.255.99 (talk) 19:57, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] self-motivating variations

The article said "A number of variations on the idea of confluence exist. These are important since they enable us to draw equivalences between confluence in the sense above and these variations." It doesn't make much sense for the variations to be important because they enable us to do something that we would have had no reason to want to do if they hadn't existed in the first place. Unfortunately I don't know the real reason for their importance; this should perhaps be added. Joriki 03:53, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, perhaps a good illustration of local confluence's important is in Newman's lemma: if we have strongly normalizing elements and local confluence we have confluence. I'm sure I remember reading elsewhere that the concept is important and why, but I'll need to go hit the books and get back to you on that one. Dysprosia 08:36, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Local confluence is also important in the Knuth-Bendix procedure, since "local confluence" is decidable, whereas "confluence" is not. 133.6.205.147 (talk) 02:24, 8 April 2008 (UTC)