Section: Application Domains

Mechanized metatheory

There has been increasing interest in the international community with the use of formal methods to provide proofs of properties of programs and entire programming languages. The example of proof carrying code is one such example. Two more examples for which the team's efforts should have important applications are the following two challenges.

Tony Hoare's Grand Challenge titled “Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments” has as a goal the construction of “verifying compilers” to support a vision of a world where programs would only be produced with machine-verified guarantees of adherence to specified behavior. Guarantees could be given in a number of ways: proof certificates being one possibility.

The PoplMark challenge [25] envisions “a world in which mechanically verified software is commonplace: a world in which theorem proving technology is used routinely by both software developers and programming language researchers alike.” The proposers of this challenge go on to say that a “crucial step towards achieving these goals is mechanized reasoning about language metatheory.” There is clearly a strong overlap in the goals of this challenge and those of part of the Parsifal team.