Tree-oriented interactive processing with an application to theorem-proving, appendix E

The concept of unstructured structure editing and ted, an editor for unstructured trees, is described. Ted is used to manipulate hierarchies of information in an unrestricted manner. The tool was implemented and applied to the problem of organizing formal proofs. As a proof management tool, it maintains the validity of a proof and its constituent lemmas independently from the methods used to validate the proof. It includes an adaptable interface which may be used to invoke theorem provers and other aids to proof construction. Using ted, a user may construct, maintain, and verify formal proofs using a variety of theorem provers, proof checkers, and formatters

Automation for interactive proof: First prototype

AbstractInteractive theorem provers require too much effort from their users. We have been developing a system in which Isabelle users obtain automatic support from automatic theorem provers (ATPs) such as Vampire and SPASS. An ATP is invoked at suitable points in the interactive session, and any proof found is given to the user in a window displaying an Isar proof script. There are numerous differences between Isabelle (polymorphic higher-order logic with type classes, natural deduction rule format) and classical ATPs (first-order, untyped, and clause form). Many of these differences have been bridged, and a working prototype that uses background processes already provides much of the desired functionality

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

From LCF to Isabelle/HOL

Interactive theorem provers have developed dramatically over the past four decades, from primitive beginnings to today's powerful systems. Here, we focus on Isabelle/HOL and its distinctive strengths. They include automatic proof search, borrowing techniques from the world of first order theorem proving, but also the automatic search for counterexamples. They include a highly readable structured language of proofs and a unique interactive development environment for editing live proof documents. Everything rests on the foundation conceived by Robin Milner for Edinburgh LCF: a proof kernel, using abstract types to ensure soundness and eliminate the need to store proofs. Compared with the research prototypes of the 1970s, Isabelle is a practical and versatile tool. It is used by system designers, mathematicians and many others

Modular pre-processing for automated reasoning in dependent type theory

The power of modern automated theorem provers can be put at the service of interactive theorem proving. But this requires in particular bridging the expressivity gap between the logics these provers are respectively based on. This paper presents the implementation of a modular suite of pre-processing transformations, which incrementally bring certain formulas expressed in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions closer to the first-order logic of Satifiability Modulo Theory solvers. These transformations address issues related to the axiomatization of inductive types, to polymorphic definitions or to the different implementations of a same theory signature. This suite is implemented as a plugin for the Coq proof assistant, and integrated to the SMTCoq toolchain