  Rewriting is a formalism widely used in computer science and mathematical
logic. The classical formalism has been extended, in the context of functional
languages, with an order over the rules and, in the context of rewrite based
languages, with the negation over patterns. We propose in this paper a concise
and clear algorithm computing the difference over patterns which can be used to
define generic encodings of constructor term rewriting systems with negation
and order into classical term rewriting systems. As a direct consequence,
established methods used for term rewriting systems can be applied to analyze
properties of the extended systems. The approach can also be seen as a generic
compiler which targets any language providing basic pattern matching
primitives. The formalism provides also a new method for deciding if a set of
patterns subsumes a given pattern and thus, for checking the presence of
useless patterns or the completeness of a set of patterns.
