Abstract

Abstract. The operational semantics and typing judgements of modern programming and specification languages are often defined using relations and proof systems. In simple settings, logic programming languages can be used to provide rather direct and natural interpreters for such operational semantics. More complex features of specifications such as names and their bindings, proof rules with negative premises, and the exhaustive enumeration of state spaces, all pose significant challenges to conventional logic programming systems. In this paper, we describe a simple architecture for the implementation of deduction systems that allows a specification to interleave between finite success and finite failure. The implementation techniques for this prover are largely common ones from higher-order logic programming, i.e., logic variables, (higherorder pattern) unification, backtracking (using stream-based computation), and abstract syntax based on simply typed λ-terms. We present a particular instance of this prover’s architecture and its prototype implementation, Level 0/1, based on the dual interpretation of (finite) success and finite failure in proof search. We show how Level 0/1 provides a highlevel and declarative implementation of model checking and bisimulation checking for the (finite) π-calculus. 1

Citations