TTREE

Major Section:  MISCELLANEOUS

Many low-level ACL2 functions take and return ``tag trees'' or ``ttrees'' (pronounced ``tee-trees'') which contain various useful bits of information such as the lemmas used, the linearize assumptions made, etc.

Let a ``tagged pair'' be a list whose car is a symbol, called the ``tag,'' and whose cdr is an arbitrary object, called the ``tagged object.'' A ``tag tree'' is either nil, a tagged pair consed onto a tag tree, or a non-nil tag tree consed onto a tag tree.

Abstractly a tag tree represents a list of sets, each member set having a name given by one of the tags occurring in the ttree. The elements of the set named tag are all of the objects tagged tag in the tree. To cons a tagged pair (tag . obj) onto a tree is to add-to-set-equal obj to the set corresponding to tag. To cons two tag trees together is to union-equal the corresponding sets. The concrete representation of the union so produced has duplicates in it, but we feel free to ignore or delete duplicates.

The beauty of this definition is that to combine two non-nil tag trees you need do only one cons.

The following function accumulates onto ans the set associated with a given tag in a ttree:

(defun tagged-objects (tag ttree ans)
 (cond
  ((null ttree) ans)
  ((symbolp (caar ttree))             ; ttree = ((tag . obj) . ttree)
   (tagged-objects tag (cdr ttree)
                   (cond ((eq (caar ttree) tag)
                          (add-to-set-equal (cdar ttree) ans))
                         (t ans))))
  (t                                  ; ttree = (ttree . ttree)
     (tagged-objects tag (cdr ttree)
                         (tagged-objects tag (car ttree) ans)))))

The rewriter, for example, takes a term and a ttree (among other things), and returns a new term, term', and new ttree, ttree'. Term' is equivalent to term (under the current assumptions) and the ttree' is an extension of ttree. If we focus just on the set associated with the tag LEMMA in the ttrees, then the set for ttree' is the extension of that for ttree obtained by unioning into it all the runes used by the rewrite. The set associated with LEMMA can be obtained by (tagged-objects 'LEMMA ttree nil).