Combining de Bruijn Indices and Higher-Order Abstract Syntax in Coq

The use of higher-order abstract syntax is an important approach for the representation of binding constructs in encodings of languages and logics in a logical framework. Formal meta-reasoning about such object languages is a particular challenge. We present a mechanism for such reasoning, formalized in Coq, inspired by the Hybrid tool in Isabelle. At the base level, we define a de Bruijn representation of terms with basic operations and a reasoning framework. At a higher level, we can represent languages and reason about them using higher-order syntax. We take advantage of Coq’s constructive logic by formulating many definitions as Coq programs. We illustrate the method on two examples: the untyped lambda calculus and quantified propositional logic. For each language, we can define recursion and induction principles that work directly on the higher-order syntax.