Implementing Nominal Unification

Nominal matching and unification underly the dynamics of nominal rewriting. Urban, Pitts and Gabbay gave a nominal unification algorithm which finds the most general solution to a nominal matching or unification problem, if one exists. Later the algorithm was extended by Fernández and Gabbay to deal with name generation and locality.In this paper we describe first a direct implementation of the nominal unification algorithm, including the extensions, in Maude. This implementation is not efficient (it is exponential in time), but we will show that we can obtain a feasible implementation by using termgraphs.