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Ott

swMATH ID: 663
Software Authors: Sewell, Peter; Nardelli, Francesco Zappa; Owens, Scott; Peskine, Gilles; Ridge, Thomas; Sarkar, Susmit; Strniša, Rok
Description: Semantic definitions of full-scale programming languages are rarely given, despite the many potential benefits. Partly this is because the available metalanguages for expressing semantics – usually either for informal mathematics or the formal mathematics of a proof assistant – make it much harder than necessary to work with large definitions. We present a metalanguage specifically designed for this problem, and a tool, Ott, that sanity-checks such definitions and compiles them into proof assistant code for Coq, HOL, and Isabelle/HOL, together with LaTeX code for production-quality typesetting, and OCaml boilerplate. The main innovations are (1) metalanguage design to make definitions concise, and easy to read and edit; (2) an expressive but intuitive metalanguage for specifying binding structures; and (3) compilation to proof assistant code. This has been tested in substantial case studies, including modular specifications of calculi from the TAPL text, a Lightweight Java with Java JSR 277/294 module system proposals, and a large fragment of OCaml, with mechanised proofs of various soundness results. Our aim with this work is to enable a phase change: making it feasible to work routinely, without heroic effort, with rigorous semantic definitions of realistic languages.
Homepage: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/ott/
Related Software: Coq; Isabelle/HOL; Nominal Isabelle; Isabelle; Twelf; PoplMark; HOL; OCaml; ML; K Prover; Abella; HYBRID; Freshml; Haskell; ACL2; Spoofax; ELPI; Beluga; Maude; JavaScript
Cited in: 33 Documents

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