An abstract type for constructing tactics in Coq

Arnaud Spiwack (1, 2)

1 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]
2 TYPICAL - Types, Logic and computing

The Coq proof assistant is a large development, a lot of which happens to be more or less dependent on the type of tactics. To be able to perform tweaks in this type more easily in the future, we propose an API for building tactics which doesn't need to expose the type of tactics and yet has a fairly small amount of primitives. This API accompanies an entirely new implementation of the core tactic engine of Coq which aims at handling more gracefully existential variables (aka. metavariables) in proofs - like in more recent proof assistants like Matita and Agda2. We shall, then, leverage this newly acquired independence of the concrete type of tactics from the API to add backtracking abilities.

Domaines: Logique en informatique [cs.LO]; Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Arnaud Spiwack. An abstract type for constructing tactics in Coq. Proof Search in Type Theory, Jul 2010, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. ⟨inria-00502500⟩