REX School/Workshop on Foundations of Object Oriented Languages, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, May 1990. [Yon91] A. Yonezawa. A Reflective Object Oriented Concurrent Language. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 441:254--256, 1991. 17 [Giu92] F. Giunchiglia. The GETFOL Manual - GETFOL version 1. Technical Report 9204-01, DIST - University of Genova, Genoa, Italy, 1992. Forthcoming IRST-Technical Report. [GMMW77] M.J. Gordon, R. Milner, L. Morris, and C. Wadsworth. A Metalanguage for Interactive Proof in LCF. CSR report series CSR-16-77, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, 1977. [GMW79] M.J. Gordon, A.J. Milner, and C.P. Wadsworth. Edinburgh LCF - A mechanized logic of computation, volume 78 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Verlag, 1979. [GT91] F. Giunchiglia and P. Traverso. Reflective reasoning with and between a declarative metatheory and the implementation code. In Proc. of the 12th International Joint C

Abstract not found

Our ultimate goal is to define a framework and a methodology which will allow users to construct or extend complex reasoning systems in such a way that the correctness of the resulting system is guaranteed. Our approach is based on the following principles: (i) construct the prover according to certain general (but precise) criteria, in particular maintain a sharp distinction among the logical, control, and interaction components; (ii) use a uniform framework to specify these three levels; (iii) represent (selected parts of) the code in a classical first order theory, use the inference capabilities of the system to reason deductively about this theory, and, as a result, synthesize new code which can be pushed back in the underlying implementation. This paper describes the approach, what we have done so far and how we intend to proceed to pursue our ultimate goal.

Flexible problem solving consists of the dynamic selection and configuration of problem solving methods for a particular problem type, depending on the particular problem and the goal of problem solving. In this paper, we propose an architecture that supports such flexible problem solving automatically. For this purpose, problem solving methods are described in a uniform way, by an abstract model of components, which together define the functionality of the methods. Such an abstract model is used for dynamic selection and configuration of the problem solving methods. The proposed architecture for flexible problem solving consists of well known reflection techniques: two object-meta relations, a definable naming mechanism and the axiomhood and theoremhood reflection rules. We have succeeded in using standard meta-architecture techniques to enable flexible problem solving.

The goal of this small paper is to give an overall informal description of a long term project, under development at the Mechanized Reasoning Group(s) at IRST and DIST, which aims at developing a system which can be used to extend its own code in a provably correct way.