Section: New Software and Platforms

Coq

The Coq Proof Assistant

Keywords: Proof - Certification - Formalisation

Scientific Description: Coq is an interactive proof assistant based on the Calculus of (Co-)Inductive Constructions, extended with universe polymorphism. This type theory features inductive and co-inductive families, an impredicative sort and a hierarchy of predicative universes, making it a very expressive logic. The calculus allows to formalize both general mathematics and computer programs, ranging from theories of finite structures to abstract algebra and categories to programming language metatheory and compiler verification. Coq is organised as a (relatively small) kernel including efficient conversion tests on which are built a set of higher-level layers: a powerful proof engine and unification algorithm, various tactics/decision procedures, a transactional document model and, at the very top an IDE.

Functional Description: Coq provides both a dependently-typed functional programming language and a logical formalism, which, altogether, support the formalisation of mathematical theories and the specification and certification of properties of programs. Coq also provides a large and extensible set of automatic or semi-automatic proof methods. Coq's programs are extractible to OCaml, Haskell, Scheme, ...

Release Functional Description: Coq version 8.10 contains two major new features: support for a native fixed-precision integer type and a new sort SProp of strict propositions. It is also the result of refinements and stabilization of previous features, deprecations or removals of deprecated features, cleanups of the internals of the system and API, and many documentation improvements. This release includes many user-visible changes, including deprecations that are documented in the next subsection, and new features that are documented in the reference manual.

Version 8.10 is the fifth release of Coq developed on a time-based development cycle. Its development spanned 6 months from the release of Coq 8.9. Vincent Laporte is the release manager and maintainer of this release. This release is the result of  2500 commits and  650 PRs merged, closing 150+ issues.

See the Zenodo citation for more information on this release: https://zenodo.org/record/3476303#.Xe54f5NKjOQ

News Of The Year: Coq 8.10.0 contains:

- some quality-of-life bug fixes, - a critical bug fix related to template polymorphism, - native 63-bit machine integers, - a new sort of definitionally proof-irrelevant propositions: SProp, - private universes for opaque polymorphic constants, - string notations and numeral notations, - a new simplex-based proof engine for the tactics lia, nia, lra and nra, - new introduction patterns for SSReflect, - a tactic to rewrite under binders: under, - easy input of non-ASCII symbols in CoqIDE, which now uses GTK3.

All details can be found in the user manual.

• Participants: Yves Bertot, Frédéric Besson, Maxime Denes, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias, Gaëtan Gilbert, Jason Gross, Hugo Herbelin, Assia Mahboubi, Érik Martin-Dorel, Guillaume Melquiond, Pierre-Marie Pédrot, Michael Soegtrop, Matthieu Sozeau, Enrico Tassi, Laurent Théry, Théo Zimmermann, Theo Winterhalter, Vincent Laporte, Arthur Charguéraud, Cyril Cohen, Christian Doczkal and Chantal Keller

• Partners: CNRS - Université Paris-Sud - ENS Lyon - Université Paris-Diderot

• Contact: Matthieu Sozeau

• URL: http://coq.inria.fr/