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Towards Self-verification of HOL Light

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Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4130))

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Abstract

The HOL Light prover is based on a logical kernel consisting of about 400 lines of mostly functional OCaml, whose complete formal verification seems to be quite feasible. We would like to formally verify (i) that the abstract HOL logic is indeed correct, and (ii) that the OCaml code does correctly implement this logic. We have performed a full verification of an imperfect but quite detailed model of the basic HOL Light core, without definitional mechanisms, and this verification is entirely conducted with respect to a set-theoretic semantics within HOL Light itself. We will duly explain why the obvious logical and pragmatic difficulties do not vitiate this approach, even though it looks impossible or useless at first sight. Extension to include definitional mechanisms seems straightforward enough, and the results so far allay most of our practical worries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intel Corporation, JF1-13, 2111 NE 25th Avenue, Hillsboro, OR, 97124, USA

    John Harrison

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  1. John Harrison
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence Research Group, University of Koblenz-Landau, Universitätsstr. 1, 56070, Koblenz

    Ulrich Furbach

  2. SRI International, MS EL256,, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, 94025-3493, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Natarajan Shankar

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Harrison, J. (2006). Towards Self-verification of HOL Light. In: Furbach, U., Shankar, N. (eds) Automated Reasoning. IJCAR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4130. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11814771_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11814771_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37187-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37188-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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