An Interactive Enhancement to the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover

Acknowledgements An early version of part of this system was written by J Moore, who I also thank for suggesting this project. Also, Bob Boyer and J Moore have been very helpful in answering questions about their theorem prover. I also thank David Goldschlag, Carl Pixley, Matt Wilding, and Bill Young for their helpful feedback in the development of this system. Finally, I truly appreciate the congenial and stimulating atmosphere that has been present during my employment at the I can't imagine a more pleasant work situation for me anywhere. Preface NOTE: Most users can get by with reading no further than Section 1 of this manual, at least until they desire to utilize the potential of this system more fully. That said ..... This manual accompanies a system for checking the provability of terms in the Boyer-Moore logic, as described in [2] and (more recently) updated in [3]. This system is loaded on top of the Boyer-Moore Theorem 1 Prover, as explained below, and is integrated with that prover. Thus, the user can give commands at a low level (such as deleting a hypothesis) or at a high level (such as calling the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover). As with a variety of proof-checking systems, this system is goal-directed: a proof is completed when the main goal and all subgoals have been proved. A notion of macro commands lets the user create compound commands, in the spirit of the tactics and tacticals of LCF [4]. Upon completion of an interactive proof, the lemma with its proof may be stored as a Boyer-Moore event which can be added to the user's current library of events (i.e. definitions and lemmas). An on-line help facility is provided. We assume a little familiarity with the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover, especially, with definition events (DEFN ....) and lemma events (PROVE-LEMMA ....). Instructions on how to install the system are provided in the file "READ_ME". The manual is organized into sections as follows. Section 1 gives an introduction to the system, including a short annotated transcript of a sample session. Section 2 contains a reasonably careful explanation of the notion of a proof "state" and an introduction to the various commands and what they do. The third section is an explanation of the facility for interactive proofs of termination for DEFN events. The fourth section is a presentation of helpful tips. The fifth section contains a description of …