Pattern completeness is the property that the left-hand sides of a functional program cover all cases w.r.t. pattern matching. In the context of term rewriting a related notion is quasi-reducibility, a prerequisite if one wants to perform ground confluence proofs by rewriting induction. In order to certify such confluence proofs, we develop a novel algorithm that decides pattern completeness and that can be used to ensure quasi-reducibility. One of the advantages of the proposed algorithm is its simple structure: it is similar to that of a regular matching algorithm and, unlike an existing decision procedure for quasi-reducibility, it avoids enumerating all terms up to a given depth. Despite the simple structure, proving the correctness of the algorithm is not immediate. Therefore we formalize the algorithm and verify its correctness using the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL. To this end, we not only verify some auxiliary algorithms, but also design an Isabelle library on sorted term rewriting. Moreover, we export the verified code in Haskell and experimentally evaluate its performance. We observe that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing algorithms, even including the pattern completeness check of the GHC Haskell compiler.
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