Structural operational semantic specifications come in different styles: small-step and big-step. A problem with the big-step style is that specifying divergence and abrupt termination gives rise to annoying duplication. We present a novel approach to representing divergence and abrupt termination in big-step semantics using status flags. This avoids the duplication problem, and uses fewer rules and premises for representing divergence than previous approaches in the literature.
@cite_19 present a novel means of doing coinductive proofs. The idea is to use a for proofs by coinduction. Their Coq library, , provides an implementation of the method, which supports proofs by coinduction using a more flexible notion of guardedness than the naive syntactic guardedness check which Coq implements. This line of work provides a promising direction for more tractable coinductive proofs.
@cite_19
2014364142 1982866418 2011757033 2183823964
Coinduction is one of the most basic concepts in computer science. It is therefore surprising that the commonly-known lattice-theoretic accounts of the principles underlying coinductive proofs are lacking in two key respects: they do not support compositional reasoning (i.e. breaking proofs into separate pieces that can be developed in isolation), and they do not support incremental reasoning (i.e. developing proofs interactively by starting from the goal and generalizing the coinduction hypothesis repeatedly as necessary). In this paper, we show how to support coinductive proofs that are both compositional and incremental, using a dead simple construction we call the parameterized greatest fixed point. The basic idea is to parameterize the greatest fixed point of interest over the accumulated knowledge of "the proof so far". While this idea has been proposed before, by Winskel in 1989 and by Moss in 2001, neither of the previous accounts suggests its general applicability to improving the state of the art in interactive coinductive proof. In addition to presenting the lattice-theoretic foundations of parameterized coinduction, demonstrating its utility on representative examples, and studying its composition with "up-to" techniques, we also explore its mechanization in proof assistants like Coq and Isabelle. Unlike traditional approaches to mechanizing coinduction (e.g. Coq's cofix), which employ syntactic "guardedness checking", parameterized coinduction offers a semantic account of guardedness. This leads to faster and more robust proof development, as we demonstrate using our new Coq library, Paco. Using a call-by-value functional language as an example, this article illustrates the use of coinductive definitions and proofs in big-step operational semantics, enabling it to describe diverging evaluations in addition to terminating evaluations. We formalize the connections between the coinductive big-step semantics and the standard small-step semantics, proving that both semantics are equivalent. We then study the use of coinductive big-step semantics in proofs of type soundness and proofs of semantic preservation for compilers. A methodological originality of this paper is that all results have been proved using the Coq proof assistant. We explain the proof-theoretic presentation of coinductive definitions and proofs offered by Coq, and show that it facilitates the discovery and the presentation of the results. Modern proof assistants such as Coq and Isabelle provide high degrees of expressiveness and assurance because they support formal reasoning in higher-order logic and supply explicit machine-checkable proof objects. Unfortunately, large scale proof development in these proof assistants is still an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. One major weakness of these proof assistants is the lack of a single language where users can develop complex tactics and decision procedures using a rich programming model and in a typeful manner. This limits the scalability of the proof development process, as users avoid developing domain-specific tactics and decision procedures. In this paper, we present VeriML - a novel language design that couples a type-safe effectful computational language with first-class support for manipulating logical terms such as propositions and proofs. The main idea behind our design is to integrate a rich logical framework - similar to the one supported by Coq - inside a computational language inspired by ML. The language design is such that the added features are orthogonal to the rest of the computational language, and also do not require significant additions to the logic language, so soundness is guaranteed. We have built a prototype implementation of VeriML including both its type-checker and an interpreter. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design by showing a number of type-safe tactics and decision procedures written in VeriML. We report on the design and preliminary evaluation of a short introductory course on interactive theorem proving and program verification using the Coq proof assistant, targeted at students with background in functional programming and software engineering. The course builds on concepts familiar from functional programming to develop understanding of logic and mechanized proving by means of the Curry-Howard isomorphism. A particular emphasis is made of the computational nature of decidable properties of various data structures. This approach is of practical importance, as Coq’s normalization can automatically simplify or discharge such properties, thus reducing the burden of constructing the proofs by hand. As a basis for teaching this style of mechanization, we use ’s Ssreflect extension of Coq and its associated libraries. In the course, we minimize the exposure to ad-hoc proof automation via tactics, and request that students develop proofs using only a small set of proof-building primitives that they should clearly understand. In addition to introducing logic as an application of functional programming, the topics covered by the course include: implementation of custom rewriting principles as instances of indexed type families, boolean reflection, implementation of algebraic structures and inheritance between them, and verification of imperative programs in separation logic and Hoare Type Theory.