Partial Rewriting and Value Interpretation of Logically Constrained Terms (Full Version)

Abstract

Logically constrained term rewrite systems (LCTRSs) are a rewriting formalism that naturally supports built-in data structures, including integers and bit-vectors. The recent framework of existentially constrained terms and most general constrained rewriting on them (Takahata et al., 2025) has many advantages over the original approach of rewriting constrained terms. In this paper, we introduce partial constrained rewriting, a variant of rewriting existentially constrained terms whose underlying idea has already appeared implicitly in previous analyses and applications of LCTRSs. We examine the differences between these two notions of constrained rewriting. First, we establish a direct correspondence between them, leveraging subsumption and equivalence of constrained terms where appropriate. Then we give characterizations of each of them, using the interpretation of existentially constrained terms by instantiation. We further introduce the novel notion of value interpretation, that highlights subtle differences between partial and most general rewriting.