We have found that questions regarding the confluence of huge rewrite systems are seldomly posed: the specification writer has a mental model of the problem at hand that provides sufficient guidance for confluent execution of the specification as rewrite system. This is fortunate, since the actual determination of the confluence of these huge specifications is hardly feasible. Similar considerations hold for the termination of the term rewriting systems we encounter.
It is, however, another form of confluence that we have argued for in this paper: the confluence of seemingly disparate areas like parallel rewriting versus GLR parsing, and coordination languages versus strategy languages.
Since GLR parsing and coordination languages have turned out to be crucial for implementing industry-sized applications based on term rewriting, we expect that a further exploration and unification of these areas, as suggested in this paper, might be beneficial for both theory and for selling term rewriting to industry.