This paper describes a practical approach for implementing domain-specific languages with extensible compilers. Given a compiler with one or more front-end languages, we introduce the idea of a "generic" front-end that allows the syntactic and semantic specification of domainspecific languages. Phobos, our generic front-end, offers modular language specification, allowing the programmer to define new syntax and semantics incrementally.

MetaPRL is the latest system to come out of over twenty five years of research by the Cornell PRL group. While initially created at Cornell, MetaPRL is currently a collaborative project involving several universities in several countries. The MetaPRL system combines the properties of an interactive LCF-style tactic-based proof assistant, a logical framework, a logical programming environment, and a formal methods programming toolkit. MetaPRL is distributed under an open-source license and can be downloaded from http://metaprl.org/. This paper provides an overview of the system focusing on the features that did not exist in the previous generations of PRL systems.

Abstract. JProver is a first-order intuitionistic theorem prover that creates sequent-style proof objects and can serve as a proof engine in interactive proof assistants with expressive constructive logics. This paper gives a brief overview of JProver’s proof technique, the generation of proof objects, and its integration into the Nuprl proof development system. 1

Digital Library (FDL). We designed the system and assembled the prototype as part of a

iii This thesis describes a theory for representing, manipulating, and reasoning about structured pieces of knowledge in open collaborative systems. The theory’s design is motivated by both its general model as well as its target user commu-nity. Its model is structured information, with emphasis on classification, relative structure, equivalence, and interpretation. Its user community is meant to be non-mathematicians and non-computer scientists that might use the theory via computational tool support once inte-grated with modern design and development tools. This thesis discusses a new logic called kind theory that meets these challenges. The core of the work is based in logic, type theory, and universal algebras. The theory is shown to be efficiently implementable, and several parts of a full realization have already been constructed and are reviewed. Additionally, several software engineering concepts, tools, and technologies have been con-structed that take advantage of this theoretical framework. These constructs are discussed as well, from the perspectives of general software engineering and applied formal methods. Acknowledgements iv I am grateful to my initial primary adviser, Prof. K. Mani Chandy, for bringing me to Caltech and his willingness to let me explore many unfamiliar research fields of my own choosing. I am also appreciative of my second adviser, Prof. Jason Hickey, for his support, encouragement, feedback, and patience through the later years of my work. If Jason had not appeared at Caltech in Autumn of 1999, I may well have not finished my Ph.D. I am very much in debt to Joseph Goguen whose inspiring work started me on the path of using algebras and categories. José Meseguer and Francisco (Paco) Duran have been of tremendous help and inspiration in my use of Maude and rewriting logic.

Reection is the ability of a deductive system to internalize aspects of its own structure and thereby reason to some extent about itself. In this paper we present a theoretical framework for exploring reection in type theories that use the \Propositions-as-Types" principle, such as Martin-Lof style theories. One of the main results is that it is unnecessary to build a complete Godel style \reection" layer on top of the logical theory. This makes it possible to use our framework for an ecient implementation of reection in theorem provers for such type theories. We are doing this for the NuPRL and MetaPRL systems.