Section: Application Domains

Mechanized metatheory

There has been increasing interest in the use of formal methods to provide proofs of properties of programs and programming languages. Tony Hoare's Grand Challenge titled “Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments” has as a goal the construction of “verifying compilers” for a world where programs would only be produced with machine-verified guarantees of adherence to specified behavior. Guarantees could be given in a number of ways: proof certificates being one possibility.

The POPLMark challenge [29] envisions “a world in which mechanically verified software is commonplace: a world in which theorem proving technology is used routinely by both software developers and programming language researchers alike.” The proposers of this challenge go on to say that a “crucial step towards achieving these goals is mechanized reasoning about language metatheory.”

The Parsifal team has developed several tools and techniques for reasoning about the meta-theory of programming languages. One of the most important requirements for programming languages is the ability to reason about data structures with binding constructs up to $\alpha$-equivalence. The use of higher-order syntax and nominal techniques for such data structures was pioneered by Miller, Nadathur and Tiu. The Abella system (see Section  3.2 ) implements a refinement of a number of these ideas and has been used to give full solutions to sections of the POPLMark challenge in addition to fully formal proofs of a number of other theorems in the meta-theory of the $\lambda$-calculus.

Now that the Abella system has been in circulation among colleagues during the past couple of years, there are many aspects of the methodology that now need to be addressed. During the summer of 2011, the team employed three interns Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University to work on different aspects of Abella. Particular focus was given to better ways to manipulate specification-logic contexts in the reasoning-logic and with finding ways to have Abella output a proper proof object (different from the scripts that are used to find a proof).

Our colleague Alwen Tiu from the Australian National University has also been building on our Bedwyr model checking tool so that we can build on top of it his SPEC system for doing model checking of spi-calculus expressions. We have adopted his enhancements to Bedwyr and are developing further improvements within the context of the BATT project (see Section  5.3 ).