Term-graph rewriting via explicit paths

The notion of path is classical in graph theory but not directly used in the term rewriting community. The main idea of this work is to raise the notion of path to the level of first-order terms, i.e. paths become part of the terms and not just meta-information about them. These paths are represented by words of integers (positive or negative) and are interpreted as relative addresses in terms. In this way, paths can also be seen as a generalization of the classical notion of position for the first-order terms and are inspired by de Bruijn indexes. In this paper, we define an original framework called Referenced Term Rewriting where paths are used to represent pointers between subterms. Using this approach, any term-graph rewriting systems can be simulated using a term rewrite-based environment.