On counting untyped lambda terms

Despite λ-calculus is now three quarters of a century old, no formula counting λ-terms has been proposed yet, and the combinatorics of λ-calculus is considered a hard problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that the recursive expression of the numbers of terms of size n with at most m free variable...

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Vydané v:Theoretical computer science Ročník 474; s. 80 - 97
Hlavný autor: Lescanne, Pierre
Médium: Journal Article
Jazyk:English
Vydavateľské údaje: Elsevier B.V 25.02.2013
Elsevier
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ISSN:0304-3975, 1879-2294
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Popis
Shrnutí:Despite λ-calculus is now three quarters of a century old, no formula counting λ-terms has been proposed yet, and the combinatorics of λ-calculus is considered a hard problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that the recursive expression of the numbers of terms of size n with at most m free variables contains the number of terms of size n−1 with at most m+1 variables. This leads to complex recurrences that cannot be handled by classical analytic methods. Here based on de Bruijn indices (another presentation of λ-calculus) we propose several results on counting untyped lambda terms, i.e., on telling how many terms belong to such or such class, according to the size of the terms and/or to the number of free variables. We extend the results to normal forms.
ISSN:0304-3975
1879-2294
DOI:10.1016/j.tcs.2012.11.019