Isabelle, ML, PIDE, Science

Isabelle/PIDE as IDE for ML

On Friday 18-Nov-2016 10:00, I will give a presentation about PIDE at Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Orsay (Paris Sud).

Abstract:

Isabelle is usually positioned as environment for interactive and automated theorem proving, but its Prover IDE (PIDE) may be used for regular program development as well. Standard ML is particularly important here, since it is the bootstrap language of Isabelle/ML (i.e. SML with many add-ons) and Isabelle/Pure (i.e. the logical framework).

The ML IDE functionality of Isabelle + Poly/ML is manifold:

  • Continuous feedback from static analysis and semantic evaluation is already available for years, e.g. Isabelle2014 (August 2014). It is a corollary of how PIDE interaction works, and of the integration of the Poly/ML compiler into that framework. Source files are statically checked and semantically evaluated while the user is editing. The annotated sources contain markup about inferred types, references to defining positions of items etc.
  • Source-level debugging within the IDE is new in Poly/ML 5.6, which is bundled with Isabelle2016 (February 2016). The Prover IDE provides the Debugger dockable to connect to running ML threads, inspect the stack frame with local ML bindings, and evaluate ML expressions in a particular run-time context. See also here.
  • IDE support for the Isabelle/Pure bootstrap process is new technology for the coming release of Isabelle2016-1 (December 2016). The ROOT.ML file acts like a quasi-theory in the context of theory ML_Bootstrap: this allows continuous checking of all loaded ML files. The theory file is presented with a modified header to import Pure from the running Isabelle instance.

    • It is also possible to modify standalone SML projects, to edit the sources freely in the ML IDE. For example, MetiTarski can participate after some trivial changes of its ROOT.ML file.

Overall, we move more and more to an integrated framework for development of formal-reasoning tools, but other applications are admissible as well.

The Slides are available, together with their sources (which are required for the live system demo).