Abstract

This position paper discusses various issues concerning requirements and design of proof assistant user interfaces (UIs). After a review of some of the difficulties faced by UI projects in academia, it presents a high-level description of proof assistant interaction. This is followed by an exposition of use cases and object identification. Several examples demonstrate the usefulness of these requirement elicitation techniques in the theorem proving domain. The second half of the paper begins with a consideration of the “principle of least effort ” for the design of theorem prover user interfaces. This is followed by a brief review of the “GUI versus text mode ” debate, proposals for better use of GUI facilities and a plea for better support of customisation. The paper ends with a discussion of architecture and system design issues. In particular, it argues for a platform architecture with an extensible set of components and the use of XML protocols for communication between UIs and proof assistant backends.

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