Abstract

We study lambda calculus and refine the notions of fi-reduction and fi-equality. In particular, we define the operation TS (term reshuffling) on -terms which reshuffles a term in such a way that more redexes become visible. Two terms are called shuffleequivalent if they have syntactically equivalent TS-images. The shuffle-equivalence classes are shown to divide the classes of fi-equal terms into smaller classes consisting of terms with similar reduction behaviour. The refinement of fi-reduction from a relation on terms to a relation on shuffle classes, called shuffle-reduction, allows one to make more redexes visible and to contract these newly visible redexes. This enables one to have more freedom in choosing the reduction path of a term, which can result in smaller terms along the reduction path if a clever reduction strategy is used. Moreover, this gain in reductional breadth is not at the expense of reductional length. We show that the -cube of [Barendregt 92] extended with shuffle...

Citations