Abstract

Automated proof assistants provide few facilities for incremental development. Generally, if the underlying structures on which a proof is based are modified, the developer must redo much of the proof. Yet incremental development is really the most natural approach for proofs of programming language properties [5, 12]. We propose “proof weaving”, a technique that allows a proof developer to combine small proofs into larger ones by merging proof objects. We automate much of the merging process and thus ease incremental proof development for programming language properties. To make the discussion concrete we take as an example the problem of proving typesoundness by proving progress and preservation [17] in Coq [3, 7]. However we believe that the methods can be generalized to other proof assistants which generate proof objects, and most directly to those proof assistants which exploit the Curry-Howard isomorphism in representing proof terms as λ-terms [16], e.g. Isabelle and Minlog. We rely on the proof developer to initially prove type-soundness for “tiny ” languages. Each of these languages encapsulates a single well-defined programming feature. For example, a tiny language of booleans can be restricted to the terms True, False, and If and their

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