# HG changeset patch
# User Christian Urban
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+We are working on a major overhaul of Nominal Isabelle. The
+latest bundles of Nominal2 are
+here.
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+To root out bugs, every programming language should be designed with the help
+of a theorem prover, and every compiler should be verified. With our work we
+aim to provide all proving technologies necessary for reasoning
+conveniently about programming languages (for example the lambda
+calculus) and compilers. For us, formal proofs should be as easy to perform as informal
+"pencil-and-paper" proofs - at least the overhead of formal proofs should not
+prevent any formalisation. Many ideas for our work come from the nominal
+logic work by Andrew
+Pitts. Our theoretical results about nominal theories enabled us to
+implement Nominal Isabelle on top of Isabelle/HOL.
+
+If you want to see a simple example illustrating our results on Nominal Isabelle click
+here. For more interesting results, we already
+completed formalisations of Church-Rosser and strong-normalisation proofs as
+well as the first part of the PoplMark
+Challenge. We also formalised some typical proofs from SOS, Karl Crary's chapter on
+logical relations from Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages, and also
+a paper on LF by Harper and
+Pfenning. In the latter paper we found a gap in
+the soundness proof and corrected it (we actually gave three solutions to the problem [6]). Urban
+formalised and also corrected the main result of his PhD, a logical relation argument for
+establishing strong normalisation of cut-elimination in classical logic. Other
+people have used Nominal Isabelle too:
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+
Our Vision
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+Note, however, that Nominal Isabelle is still an ongoing research +project, which needs both theoretical and implementation work. You are +encouraged to subscribe to the (moderated) + +mailing list to hear about our progress and to give +us feedback.
+ ++We have recently re-implemented the underlying nominal theory [7] and also have +a good proposal for how to deal with general binding structures in Nominal Isabelle [8]. +
[1] | ++ Nominal Reasoning Techniques in Isabelle/HOL. In + Journal of Automatic Reasoning, Vol. 40(4), 327-356, 2008. + [pdf]. + The predecessor paper, which appeaerd at CADE in 2005, received the + Thoralf Skolem Award. + | +
[2] | ++ A Formal Treatment of the Barendregt Variable Convention in Rule Inductions + (Christian Urban and Michael Norrish) + Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Mechanized Reasoning about Languages with Variable + Binding and Names (MERLIN 2005), Pages 25-32, 2005. © ACM, Inc. + [ps] + [pdf] + | +
[3] | ++ A Recursion Combinator for Nominal Datatypes Implemented in Isabelle/HOL + (Christian Urban and Stefan Berghofer) + Proceedings of the 3rd + International Joint Conference on Automated Deduction (IJCAR 2006). In volume 4130 of + Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Pages 498-512, 2006. + © Springer Verlag + [ps] + | +
[4] | ++ A Head-to-Head Comparison of de Bruijn Indices and Names. + (Stefan Berghofer and Christian Urban) + Proceedings of the International Workshop on Logical Frameworks and + Meta-Languages: Theory and Practice (LFMTP 2006), ENTCS, Pages 53-67, 2006. + [ps] + | +
[5] | ++ Barendregt's Variable Convention in Rule Inductions. (Christian + Urban, Stefan Berghofer and Michael Norrish) Proceedings of the 21th + Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE 2007). In volume 4603 of Lecture + Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Pages 35-50, 2007. + © Springer Verlag + [ps] + | +
[6] | ++ Mechanising the Metatheory of LF. + (Christian Urban, James Cheney and Stefan Berghofer) + In Proc. of the 23rd IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2008), IEEE Computer Society, + Pages 45-56, 2008. + [pdf] More + information elsewhere. + | +
[7] | ++ Proof Pearl: A New Foundation for Nominal Isabelle. + (Brian Huffman and Christian Urban) + In Proc. of the 1st Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2010). In volume 6172 in + Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Pages 35-50, 2010. + [pdf] + | +
[8] | ++ General Bindings and Alpha-Equivalence in Nominal Isabelle. + (Christian Urban and Cezary Kaliszyk) + In Proc. of the 20th European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 2011). + In Volume 6602 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Pages 480-500, 2011. + [pdf] (and a + longer version appeared in the Journal of Logical Methods in Computer + Science, Volume 8 (2:14), 2012 + [pdf]) + | + +
+[Validate this page.] + + +