Category Archives: Isabelle

Isabelle

Release candidates for Isabelle2016-1

The coming Isabelle2016-1 release is scheduled for December 2016. This spot is continuously updated to inform about the ongoing process of testing release candidates.

  • On 07-Oct-2016 an informal snapshot Isabelle2016-1-RC0 was published.
  • On 28-Oct-2016 the release candidate Isabelle2016-1-RC1 was published. Serious testing by users is now required, to expose remaining problems.
  • On 06-Nov-2016 the release candidate Isabelle2016-1-RC2 was published. Various details have been consolidated.
  • On 22-Nov-2016 the release candidate Isabelle2016-1-RC3 was published. More fine points have been consolidated. A component for the new experimental Nunchaku tool has been included.
  • On 27-Nov-2016 the release candidate Isabelle2016-1-RC4 was published. It introduces the following important last-minute changes:
    1. Prover IDE: more aggressive flushing of machine-generated input
    2. Sledgehammer: MaSh is faster and less likely to hang seemingly forever
    3. fine-tuning of Isabelle/LaTeX typesetting
  • On 08-Dec-2016 the release candidate Isabelle2016-1-RC5 was published, presumably the last one. It introduces the following important last-minute changes:
    1. more uniform automatic indentation (empty vs. non-empty lines)
    2. fewer tracing/warning messages in some proof tools

The Isabelle release process is subject to the laws of causality: release candidates can be modified, but the final release remains final. Testing needs to happen in the weeks before the final release, not after it.

The main forum for discussion of Isabelle2016-1 release candidates is on isabelle-users mailing list.

Update 13-Dec-2016: The final release of Isabelle2016-1 (December 2016) is now available from the Isabelle website. The above release candidates will disappear eventually.

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).

Isabelle, PIDE, Science

Isabelle/PIDE — from Interactive Theorem Proving to Integrated Theorem Proving

On Tuesday 15-Nov-2016 14:00, I will give a presentation about PIDE at Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification, Cachan (Paris). See also the official announcement.

Abstract:

Interactive theorem proving was historically tied to the read-eval-print loop, with sequential and synchronous evaluation of prover commands given on the command-line. This user-interface technology was adequate when Robin Milner introduced his LCF proof assistant in the 1970s, but today it severely restricts the potential of multicore hardware and advanced IDE front-ends.

The Isabelle Prover IDE breaks this loop and retrofits the read-eval-print phases into an asynchronous model of document-oriented proof processing. Instead of feeding a sequence of commands into the prover process, the primary interface works via edits over immutable document versions. Execution is implicit and managed by the prover in a timeless and stateless manner, making adequate use of parallel hardware.

PIDE document content consists of the theory sources (with dependencies via theory imports), and auxiliary source files of arbitrary user-defined format: this allows to integrate other languages than Isabelle/Isar into the IDE. A notable application is the Isabelle/ML IDE, which can be also applied to the system itself, to support interactive bootstrapping of the Isabelle/Pure implementation.

Further tool integration works via “asynchronous print functions” that operate on already checked theory sources. Thus long-running or potentially non-terminating processes may provide spontaneous feedback while the user is editing. Applications range from traditional proof state output (which often consumes substantial run-time) to automated provers and dis-provers that report on existing proof document content (e.g. Sledgehammer, Nitpick, Quickcheck in Isabelle/HOL). It is also possible to integrate “query operations” via additional GUI panels with separate input and output (e.g. for manual Sledgehammer invocation or find-theorems).

Thus the Prover IDE orchestrates a suite of tools that help the user to write proofs. In particular, the classic distinction of ATP and ITP is overcome in this emerging paradigm of Integrated Theorem Proving.

The Slides are available.

Isabelle, Science

The Isar proof language in 2016

At the Isabelle Workshop 2016 in Nancy, I presented a paper about recent renovations of the Isar proof language:

This is a description of the Isar proof language as it stands today in 2016. This means the official release Isabelle2016 (February 2016), and the next release that is presumably published towards the end of the year. Relevant NEWS entries and updated portions from the Isabelle/Isar Reference Manual are summarized in one comprehensive article.

See also the full paper and the slides.

Isabelle, Local

Video for Isabelle presentation at Curry Club Augsburg

Another Isabelle presentation at Curry Club Augsburg (19-May-2016) has been recorded and uploaded to Youtube.

Materials from the presentation:

  • Exercise from Haskell Workshop 1 + 2 (Dec-2015).
  • Solution produced during the presentation.
  • Slides that were briefly shown towards the end.

To try it interactively (with Prover IDE markup), it is possible to open the URL of the Solution directly in Isabelle/jEdit.

Isabelle, ML, PIDE

PIDE as Standard ML IDE for bootstrapping Isabelle

Isabelle is usually advertized 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).

Using Isabelle/PIDE for bootstrapping Isabelle itself is now possible in recent repository versions, e.g. Isabelle/1c1f8531ca37 – see also README_REPOSITORY for general explanations how to build and run that. Here is the relevant NEWS entry from that version:

IDE support for the Isabelle/Pure bootstrap process. The initial files src/Pure/ROOT0.ML or src/Pure/ROOT.ML may be opened with Isabelle/jEdit: they act like independent quasi-theories in the context of theory ML_Bootstrap. This allows continuous checking of ML files as usual, but results are isolated from the actual Isabelle/Pure that runs the IDE
itself.

The ML project consists of a sequence of ML_file commands in ROOT.ML. Projects other than Isabelle can do the same with SML_file for official Standard ML. Afterwards, the following Poly/ML command line is able to build the project without the IDE: poly --eval "val SML_file = PolyML.use" --use ROOT.ML

What is also notable in the Isabelle/Pure bootstrap environment is the structure Thread_Data for global state variables within the current thread. There are two implementations: (1) physical and (2) virtual. The virtual version is used when Isabelle/Pure is loaded into itself: it allows to manage many versions of the load process with different intermediate states in a value-oriented manner.

Isabelle, ML

Isabelle no longer supports SML/NJ

17-Feb-2016 marks the historic day when support for SML/NJ was removed from the Isabelle code base, see the main changeset and another changeset concerning ML multithreading.

The changes of the source illustrate the amount of conditional compilation that has accumulated in the past decades of Isabelle development. In the future, we will be able to proceed faster in just one direction, and pick up more advanced features of Poly/ML.

Already ten years ago, SML/NJ had little practical relevance for Isabelle users. It was occasionally used by tool developers to figure out difficult situations of type-inference, at a time when the SML/NJ compiler errors were better than the ones of Poly/ML. This has changed dramatically in recent years, with fairly good compiler errors and full IDE support in Poly/ML.

Performance of SML/NJ had always been a problem (after 1993): growing with the total heap size of Isabelle applications. This is inherent in the “CPS approach” of SML/NJ, see also this brief discussion on Stackoverflow.

The reason for giving up these tons of extra weight right after shipping Isabelle2016 are rather profane: in the routine tests of SML/NJ for the release, many basic Isabelle sessions (e.g. HOL-Library) no longer worked, running out of memory (within 32bit address space) after many hours.

Isabelle

Announcing Isabelle2016

Isabelle2016 is now available.

This version improves upon Isabelle2015 in many ways, see the NEWS file in the distribution for further details. Some highlights are as follows:

  • Enhanced Isabelle/jEdit Prover IDE, with separate State versus Output panel and more asynchronous task management within the prover/GUI.
  • Additional Isar language elements for structured statements and proofs.
  • Document language refinements, with Markdown-like text structure.
  • More Isabelle symbols in theory and document sources.
  • Pure/HOL: uniform treatment of overloaded constant definitions versus type definitions; upgrade of HOL typedef to definitional principle.
  • HOL tool enhancements: Sledgehammer, Nitpick, Quickcheck, Transfer.
  • HOL library additions and improvements, notably HOL-Multivariate_Analysis, HOL-Probability, HOL-Data_Structures.
  • Upgrade to Poly/ML 5.6 with debugger IDE support (Isabelle/ML and Standard ML), per-thread profiling, native Windows version (32bit and 64bit).

You may get Isabelle2016 from the following mirror sites: