From LCF to Isabelle/HOL
Abstract
Interactive theorem provers have developed dramatically over the past four decades, from primitive beginnings to today's powerful systems. Here, we focus on Isabelle/HOL and its distinctive strengths. They include automatic proof search, borrowing techniques from the world of first order theorem proving, but also the automatic search for counterexamples. They include a highly readable structured language of proofs and a unique interactive development environment for editing live proof documents. Everything rests on the foundation conceived by Robin Milner for Edinburgh LCF: a proof kernel, using abstract types to ensure soundness and eliminate the need to store proofs. Compared with the research prototypes of the 1970s, Isabelle is a practical and versatile tool. It is used by system designers, mathematicians and many others.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.02836,
title = {From LCF to Isabelle/HOL},
author = {Lawrence C. Paulson and Tobias Nipkow and Makarius Wenzel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.02836},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
25 pages. Accepted to Formal Aspects of Computing