The C standard formalized in Coq
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CH2O's main innovation is C standard (as opposed to C implementation) formalized in general purpose prover (as opposed to custom system). KCC formalized C standard, but not in general purpose prover. CompCert formalized in general purpose prover, but formalized implementation instead of standard.
Formalizing in general purpose prover is useful because you can use all of math to prove runtime invariants. But if you want to prove runtime invariants, you usually want to prove with respect to concrete implementation, not to prove abstractly to standard. For time when you want to prove abstractly to standard, this doesn't seem better than KCC.
In short, this feels like Not Invented Here against KCC. Probably unfair characterization, but that's what it feels to me.
That's where I'd go. Extending KCC to do what a theorem prover could seems more challenging.
"For time when you want to prove abstractly to standard, this doesn't seem better than KCC. In short, this feels like Not Invented Here against KCC. Probably unfair characterization, but that's what it feels to me."
The obvious interpretation is commenter thinking KCC is better and (see NIH) the OP should've maybe done something with it instead...?
" Another comment points out following the standard is good for portabilities sake. Somehow, that all seems obvious to me."
You can follow the standard and be portable if you keep certain parts as options subject to interpretation/choice of the implementers. That's the so-called undefined behavior mostly.
Really? I would think that if you're trying to write a portable program, it would be much more useful to prove invariants based on the language specification, not a particular concrete implementation.
There are a few real gems in this thesis. In particular, I really liked the explanation of sequence points in terms of separating conjunction. This is much more compact than the imperative program to decide definedness that is implicitly described in the C standard.
The proofs of equivalence between the different semantic descriptions also go beyond what KCC does, or for that matter what you can do within the K framework (at the moment).
The official standards mailing lists for C and C++ are constantly filled with issues regarding inconsistencies in the ISO standards, and for C++ at least people often resort to trying a code sample in multiple major compilers to decide what it's "supposed to do" when the standard is unclear.
It might be a bit better with C, but I once tried to start implementing a toy C++ compiler by following the text of the standard literally and it became impossible pretty quickly. There are so many pieces where you are just expected to know what they intend and what inconsistencies can be ignored because you're already familiar with the language that it would be difficult to call any one person's interpretation a formalization of the standard itself.
Interesting! If the standard is under-specified, then presumably this student must have had to fill in some of the holes themselves, or found a way to represent multiple interpretations simultaneously.
> issues regarding inconsistencies in the ISO standards
If the standards are inconsistent (in a logical sense), and this formalization is sufficiently complete, it should uncover those inconsistencies since they would amount to type errors in Coq. I wonder if the author had any of those difficulties.
> trying a code sample in multiple major compilers to decide what it's "supposed to do" when the standard is unclear
One of the effects a project like this could have is to make this (at least theoretically) unnecessary to do.
> implementing a toy C++ compiler by following the text of the standard literally and it became impossible pretty quickly
Fortunately C is a much smaller and simpler language than C++. Isn't the C++ standard almost 1000 pages? I'm not sure what the C standard is but it must be quite a bit smaller.
Regardless, it's a PhD thesis so the difficulty of the task isn't a reason not to attempt it :)
The language specification itself is only about ~450 pages, the rest is library. It of course inherits all of the insanity of C on top of that (~170 pages of C language spec), which I'd argue brings a disproportionately large share of the pain.
Alex's point is that the standard doesn't really begin to give you an idea how hard it is to write an implementation, or make decisions about everything that's unspecified or ambiguous.
The C standard library is incorporated by reference (with a few tweaks) into the C++ standard. Of course the C++ standard library also includes a lot of material that isn't in the C standard library.
[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?rfc=7230&eid=41...
Instead of dependent types (in fact, TLA+ is untyped[2]) It is based on simple ZF set theory and logic, and should be immediately familiar to anyone who's taken even one logic (or discrete math) course in college. In addition to a proof assistant it has a good model checker, comes bundled in a nice (relatively speaking) IDE, and is easy to learn (with a thorough tutorial written by Leslie Lamport himself).
TLA+ is also more widely used in the industry -- both hardware and software -- perhaps most notably in the software industry by Amazon, who use TLA+ to specify many of their AWS services. TLA+ is a formal specification (and verification) tool designed for engineers and used by engineers. Although, to be fair, neither tool is used by a large portion of the industry.
EDIT: Removed potentially incendiary Lamport quote.
EDIT: Changed an incorrect statement about Coq's use in the industry
[1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/tl...
[2]: See Should Your Specification Language Be Typed? by Lamport and Paulson: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/l...
The number of people in industry who use either tool is incredibly small and is likely to remain so; developers spend 20-50% of their time on test suites and STILL don't feel it's cost-effective to write down formal specs, even in TLA+-style specifications.
What matters is that important libraries and frameworks can be verified, not that everyone and his brother can use formal methods for every WordPress website they churn out.
I agree, but I see some chance of TLA+ of getting wide(r) adoption, precisely because it is rather easy to learn and uses math that most engineers are already familiar with. Also, it allows gradual verification: specification -> model-checking -> proof (with each additional step being completely optional)
> not that everyone and his brother can use formal methods for every WordPress website they churn out.
I don't know about WordPress websites, but Amazon engineers do use TLA+ to specify many (most?) AWS services.
Also, formalizing architectural properties for the world's most popular cloud service is probably even rarer a task than formalizing language specifications.
English usage note: if the word you meant to use was "disingenuous", I would suggest "spurious" instead, as it expresses similar feelings about "this distinction", without also attributing unsavory motives to 'pron.
How many zero-day security flaws have to occur in core infrastructure like, for instance, OpenSSH before the laziness of engineers about learning "academic" tools stops being a cost-effective excuse not to use formal methods?
I'm not very into C language - what are these miscompilation issues? What is the practical impact that CompCert C brings?
The paper explains what-is-bug/what-causes-it/what-is-impact for selected bugs. Complete list of 282 compiler bugs found (79 GCC, 203 LLVM) is also available online: http://embed.cs.utah.edu/csmith/.
The characterization in pron's post is decidedly biased toward TLA+ in a way that I think is unnecessary. A few correctives:
* Coq has seen plenty of industry adoption. To say that type-theoretic theorem provers (or the Coq system specifically) are merely academic toys compared to TLA+ is wrong.
* "Normal" mathematicians (not just "weird Computer Science-type" mathematicians, whatever that means...) have used and extolled the virtues of Coq as a tool as well as its theoretical foundations. See e.g., the univalent foundations project. Regardless, I'm not sure I understand why "Computer Science-type math" is an unreasonable foundations for a program specification tool, which is what TLA+ is. And if the goal is formalized mathematics, you're probably better off with Coq (and it's not even clear that the TLA+ community is interested in that sort of thing, independnet of results useful in the course of a program specification/verification task.)
* If you're familiar with (esp. typed) functional programming, you might find Coq even easier to get into than TLA+. On both sides of the type theory vs sets/axioms divide, people should be careful not to confuse one's predispositions based upon educational background with the actual mental load of learning to use a tool.
There is room for both of these tools (and more!) in the world. I don't understand why they have to be in competition. A formalization of the C standard is a HUGE undertaking, independent of what tool was used. Let's celebrate that achievement!
I never said that Coq is an academic toy. Some projects done in academia and used in the industry have been verified with Coq, but I am not aware of actual (direct) use of Coq in the industry (but would be interested to learn of any).
> I'm not sure I understand why "Computer Science-type math" is an unreasonable foundations for a program specification tool, which is what TLA+ is
I've never said it is unreasonable, only that it is foreign to most engineers (as well as most academic CS people), or rather, more foreign than basic logic/set theory.
I would say again that if you're comfortable with type theory, you might enjoy Coq better. If not, TLA+ would probably be more approachable. TLA+ has the added advantage of having a model checker, which is very useful when you don't have the resources required for a full proof, but still want a good confidence in the correctness of your algorithm.
> A formalization of the C standard is a HUGE undertaking, independent of what tool was used. Let's celebrate that achievement!
Oh, absolutely! It's just that stories like this make people interested in formal methods, and Coq, IMO, would be daunting for most. TLA+ is a good entry point to formal methods, even if you later choose to move to dependent-type approaches and tools.
The first EAL7 certified smart card certification used coq, see: https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/iccc/9iccc/pdf/B2404.pd...
They mention > 117,000 lines of Coq with > 1600 proofs to get EAL7 for the JVM.
Lamport has this to say on the matter:
The main virtue of these type theories is precisely that they are constructive. A constructive proof that two arbitrary numbers always have a greatest common divisor provides an algorithm for computing it [Thompson 1991]. Researchers, using tools such as Coq and Nuprl are investigating whether this can lead to a practical method of synthesizing programs.
You can perform classical reasoning in a constructive type theory by adding P ∨ ¬P as an axiom. The resulting system will probably be strong enough to handle any specification problem likely to arise. However, it will be no stronger than ZF, and it will be much more cumbersome to use.
In the end, he opted for set theory because it is simpler, more familiar, and more flexible. Are there any advantages to using dependent types? Is the main advantage indeed synthesizing programs from proofs?
It's one major advantage, yes. And not just for the sake of software verification. Sometimes when proving a non-CS-type-math theorem you still want an efficient implementation of an existence proof.
But code synthesis is a lot harder than merely being constructive, and efficient code synthesis even more so. Use cases for Coq that depend upon code synthesis don't come for free just by avoiding LEM. So although it's fair to say that you can do classical reasoning in Coq, I'm not sure saying you can do synthesis from TLA+ if only you avoid LEM is fair at the moment (I might be wrong).
> Are there any advantages to using dependent types?
Here are a few other reasons for using Coq:
* Proof terms. There are two major disagreements here. The first grounds out in philosophy and the second basically amounts to "you really want to compose the proofs and make sure they are still a proof instead of just throwing away the proof and using the theorem" which has lots of good systems-y justifications
* Specifically wrt TLA+, Modus Operandi matters. If you want a formal proof in the typical sense of the word (rather than a verification of fact based upon model checker output), then Coq userlands's tactics and theorems are useful.
* Lots of people like to disparage the amount of algebra that FPers talk about. But it turns out that if studying those algebraic structures is your day job, the relationships between types and algebraic structures makes type theory convienant.
>simpler, more familiar
This is almost definitionally subjective. Which isn't meant as a criticism, in-so-far as one realizes that other people might have different experiences and so might (just as validly) consider other formalisms more familiar.
> and more flexible
There are (obviously) a lot of people who fundamentally disagree with the concrete arguments Lamport makes in this paper. I wish someone would annotate the paper with references to literature from the type theory community that address some of his concerns.
For the record, I don't disagree with Lamport. I think Lamport is right -- for some use cases, it certainly makes sense to stick with ZF. But he's also wrong -- sometimes, the type theoretic approach really is simpler, more familiar, and more flexible. E.g., in the case of this dissertation.
TLA+ has them, too.
> in-so-far as one realizes that other people might have different experiences and so might (just as validly) consider other formalisms more familiar.
So you think some people are more familiar with type theory than with undergrad-level set theory (ZF)?
> sometimes, the type theoretic approach really is simpler, more familiar, and more flexible. E.g., in the case of this dissertation
I don't see it (probably because my type theory is very, very basic; I'm an algorithm's guy and the thought that a data-structure of mine might need type theory to be specified makes me shudder), as in I fail to see anything that isn't readily expressible in simple classical logic + temporal logic. Could you explain?
Like I said, modus operandi matters. If I have to perform another model checking routine (possibly on an infinite state space) to slightly generalize a theorem, then in many cases that means I never really had a useful proof of it in the first place.
Also, Coq's mathematics library is extensive and often closely follows the proofs found in graduate mathematics text books. Last I looked into TLA+, it was squarely focused on algorithms and hardware (not even CS-related mathematics more generally -- specifically algorithms and hardware).
> So you think some people are more familiar with type theory than with undergrad-level set theory (ZF)?
Do I think there exists some population of people who are "more familiar" with type theory than with ZF? Yes, starting, for example, with every researcher whose primary area of study is type theory. In fact, I think that anyone who doesn't honestly believe there are such people must have an extremely low opinion of quite a number of very smart people.
(Also, set theory qua set theory gets really disgusting and kludgey really quickly, and is something that almost no undergraduate (or even phd student) is exposed to these days. The "set theory" you see in a discrete math course kind of barely scrapes definitions. I think most people who posit that "set theory" is nice and simple must've never really dove deem into the actual theory of set theory...)
(Also, most real math these days quickly abstracts away from germanely set theoretic constructions. Mathematicians don't work in ZF. They do not. Most will tell you they do not, if they even know what ZF is. Which a lot won't, because their undergrad discrete math course is probably the last time they saw a truly formal derivation. And the mathematicians who do know what ZF is often can't regurgitate an axiomatization of ZF. If you tell a mathematician that all of math is just set theory, most will chuckle and wink and say "why, yes, yes it is", and hopefully you're in on the joke...)
> I don't see it... I fail to see anything that isn't readily expressible in simple classical logic + temporal logic. Could you explain?
Did you read this dissertation's explanation of why separation logic is important?
To the extent that this observation is remotely reasonable, it's only in the sense that you can code up one logic in another. Which, well, all the world's a TM, as they say...
Anyways, I think the argument over whether type theory is a successful foundations for CS research and practice is already a closed issue. It demonstrably is. So is set theory.
Why model checking? TLA+ is not a model checker. It's a specification and proof language. There is a model checker that can check TLA+ specs, just as there is a proof assistant that can check TLA+ proofs.
> must have an extremely low opinion of quite a number of very smart people.
Why low opinion? Type theory isn't "smarter", it's just more obscure.
> The "set theory" you see in a discrete math course kind of barely scrapes definitions. I think most people who posit that "set theory" is nice and simple must've never really dove deem into the actual theory of set theory...
Thankfully, that basic set theory -- the one that barely scrapes the definition -- is all that's required to specify real-world programs.
> Did you read this dissertation's explanation of why separation logic is important?
Skimmed it. Unless I'm missing something (which is quite possible) it seems very straightforward to use in TLA+: you just define the operators just as they're defined in the paper. There's no need to "code" the logic in any arcane or non-obvious way; just define it. In fact, this short paper describes doing just that and it seems pretty basic: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.570...
> Anyways, I think the argument over whether type theory is a successful foundations for CS research and practice is already a closed issue. It demonstrably is.
It never even crossed my mind to make the case that it isn't. That type theory is an interesting topic for research is obvious. I also never implied that dependent-type tools can't do the job; as you say, they demonstrably can. I simply asked if I -- a programmer working in the industry -- had a program I wished to verify, whether there was a reason why I would reach for a dependent-type tool vs. a classical logic tool. So far, I don't see why I should. It seems to basically boil down (at least according to the responses in this thread) to whether I prefer working with direct, classical logic or with dependent types.
For the third (!) time, modus operandi matters.
Coq's huge library of tactics and proofs of facts that TLA+ might just throw at a model checker are, in my experience, very useful starting points for things that can't be model checked.
Ostentibly TLA+ could build up an equivalent library of tactics and proofs.
> Why low opinion?
Even supposing type theory is "more obscure", it's pretty hard to believe that someone could study it for 30 years and not understand it better (in some sense) than ZF. That's a pretty extraordinary claim.
> basic set theory -- the one that barely scrapes the definition -- is all that's required to specify real-world programs.
Not really -- you often need non-trivial constructions when proving properties about rewrite systems within set theory. Those constructions are much harder to understand than induction on algebraic datatypes, which is why type theoretic approaches have dominated in formalization of programming languages.
>Unless I'm missing something...
I'm disinclined the dismiss separation logic just because you can code up some of its ideas in another logic (in a way that counts as a novel contribution worthy of publication, no less).
The clarity with which separation logic presents the idea and use of the separating conjunction has obviously influenced the paper you cited. I would think this is reason enough to summarily dismiss these "everything's a TM"-style arguments you're making here. The authors of the paper you cited are only not using separation logic in a kind of meaningless sense IMO.
> So far, I don't see why I should.
This sentiment kind of reminds me of people who have never typeset mathematics complaining that LaTeX is useless... which is to say, perhaps you simply aren't interested in and so don't care about the use cases where Coq shines? Lots of people -- including me -- have already pointed out a lot of these use-cases in this comment section.
But really, based on the arc of this conversation, I would be enormously surprised if you chose to use Coq to prove X, even if there were a proveX tactic already written in Coq and the TLA+ implementation would take all day ;-)
I don't understand what you're saying. What does TLA+ have to do with the model checker? TLA+ is a language, while TLAPS (the proof system) and TLC (a model checker) are two different products (each supporting different subsets of TLA+, BTW). TLAPS comes with its own library of proofs. I don't know how extensive they are.
AFAIK, you can't (and certainly you don't) take a fact verified by the model checker and state it as an axiom of your proof. The interaction between the two -- if any -- is that Lamport encourages you to model check your spec before trying to prove it (assuming you want to prove it, or even model-check it) because proving things that are false may prove hard. However, the result of the model checker play no part in the proof.
When it comes to proofs, TLA+ is intended to be declarative and independent of the proof engines used (by default, TLAPS uses SMT (any of several solvers), Isabelle and another couple of tool, passing every proof step to every tool unless a tactic specifies a particular one).
This is a nice introduction for the design of the TLA+ proof language: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p... which includes (in the appendix) a few proofs in calculus.
> it's pretty hard to believe that someone could study it for 30 years and not understand it better (in some sense) than ZF. That's a pretty extraordinary claim.
I did not mean to claim that type theory researchers don't understand it better than basic college set-theory. I meant that in general, engineers and academics are more familiar with basic set theory.
> just because you can code up some of its ideas in another logic (in a way that counts as a novel contribution worthy of publication, no less).
That was a technical report that mentioned in passing using an approach similar to separation logic.
> "everything's a TM"-style arguments you're making here
I am not making that argument. My argument is that most engineers and CS academics (except those in PLT) would be more familiar -- and therefore more likely to use -- a tool based on basic math they know well. In addition, I haven't seen anything to suggest that the complexity difference between specifying a system using dependent types and specifying it in TLA+ is significant at all in either direction. Learning Coq, however, requires much more effort, and AFIK, it doesn't support formal verification mechanisms other than proofs (e.g. model checking)
> perhaps you simply aren't interested in and so don't care about the use cases where Coq shines?
Perhaps. I design data structures (mostly concurrent), and my interests lie in specifying and verifying those as well as distributed systems, and less in verifying compilers. My current TLA+ spec is too complex to be proven anyway (regardless of the tool used) in any feasible amount of time, so I rely on just the spec as well as some model checking.
It is also true that I may be biased. As an "algorithms guy" I feel more at home working with tools and languages designed by other algorithm people (and more importantly for algorithm people) rather than PLT people.
Nevertheless, I'm interested in learning the difference between the two.
> But really, based on the arc of this conversation, I would be enormously surprised if you chose to use Coq to prove X, even if there were a proveX tactic already written in Coq and the TLA+ implementation would take all day
Considering that learning Coq would take me much longer than a day, that would be a wise decision.
For instance, in higher-order set theory a (very strong) form of the axiom of choice asserts that there is a function "epsilon : set -> set", such that "epsilon x \in x" for x not empty. Expressing the same in first-order ZFC turns the whole statement on its head since you need to encode this function somehow. This leads to (almost) equivalent but misleading statements, such as "the intersection of a set all of whose inhabitants are non-empty is non-empty". Now if you look into TLA+, you will find that this choice operator epsilon has been added to the language, because it is so useful in practice! And this is just one instance of something that "type-theory" can add over classical ZFC. More to the point, higher-order specifications are crucial for the verification of higher-order programs. Higher-order programs are in turn one of the most useful tools for writing modular code.
Sorry for the nitpicking; let me get back on topic.
The main advantage of Martin-Löf style type theory is that it makes it easy to build new abstractions. For instance, the Bedrock project (http://plv.csail.mit.edu/bedrock/) builds an extensible program verification environment within Coq. This is only possible because the underlying logic is so expressive that you can build internal models for whichever pet logic you want to reason in. From a practical point of view dependent types and the conversion rule - computations in proofs - allows you to build scalable (reflective) proof automation while retaining a small trusted base.
The constructive aspect of Martin-Löf type theory is very pleasing from a philosophical point of view, but again in practice it's not the most relevant aspect. The main reason for me to use something other than classical logic is that there are more models of intuitionistic logic than of classical logic. This gives you more freedom in designing a logic which makes it easy to reason about your particular problem domain. For instance, if you work with Cyberphysical systems, you might like to work within the framework of synthetic differential geometry where all functions are smooth and the real numbers are as simple as they can ever be.
What so many people seem to be ignoring is that the logic you use for reasoning is part of your design space. Saying "I'll just use ZFC" is exactly the same as a programmer exclaiming "I'll just use COBOL". Leslie Lamport designed TLA+ to make it easy to reason about distributed systems. There may well be a nicer logic for reasoning about distributed systems, but you will probably not find it among the models of classical ZFC, since there aren't really that many of them...
On the other hand, there are many different flavors of type theory, just waiting to be discovered. And in my view that's the main advantage of looking beyond set theory.
Such higher-order statements are easily expressible in TLA+ as long as you specify the domain of the sets on which you operate, which you should always be able to do when specifying real programs, even higher-order programs. Here it is in TLA+:
∃ epsilon ∈ [SUBSET S → S] : ∀x ∈ SUBSET S : epsilon[x] ∈ x
> Saying "I'll just use ZFC" is exactly the same as a programmer exclaiming "I'll just use COBOL".
I don't think it's the same at all, considering that 99.9% of math is done with "just ZFC". I don't doubt that type theory may let us explore other logics, but as a practical way for specifying real programs today I fail to see a case in favor of dependent types. Sure, I believe dependent types may let you define all sorts of modal logic, but in practice, temporal logic has proven a good way to specify algorithms. So I think that a more suitable analogy would be, "Why confine your thinking to von-Neumann machines when you can use a meta-logic to specify programs for Quantum computers and other computational models". In that case, "I'll just use a von-Neumann machine" seems like a very reasonable choice for any work that isn't theoretical.
But this is missing the point. There is a lot of active research work on program logics for reasoning about e.g., concurrent programs in weak memory models. You may be able to encode the model of something like Iris (http://plv.mpi-sws.org/iris/) in TLA, but the challenge lies in doing this in a usable format...
All the constructions I know use at least second order logic and something like Iris is - as far as I know - most elegantly described internal to the topos of trees. If you have found a good way to avoid this complexity then that's a significant contribution.
At the moment we're not open-sourcing the spec (I'm an engineer, not an academic) but we might in the future. We've opted not to even try to prove the system's correctness, as that might take decades (it's far more complex than, say, seL4). Instead, we're just formally specifying it, and model-checking it with a finite model. The software in question, however, is itself open-source and is described here: http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2012/08/20/distributed-b-tre...
> All the constructions I know use at least second order logic
Concurrent algorithms are specified with TLA+ (in the industry, I mean) quite frequently. Also, specifying the memory consistency properties does require second order logic, but as I've shown in another comment, TLA+ handles second-order logic gracefully and in a very straightforward matter (trivially, I would say). You simply write:
∃ ordering ∈ [operations → SequenceOf(Op)] : ConsistencyProperty(ordering[operations])
∃ epsilon ∈ [SUBSET S → S] : ∀x ∈ SUBSET S : x ≠ {} ⇒ epsilon[x] ∈ x
∃ epsilon : ∀x : x ≠ {} ⇒ epsilon[x] ∈ x
There is a self-contained book; IMO chapter 1 gives a good overview of what you should be comfortable with:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/bo...
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/little-prover
Now, Coq has plenty of history in certified programming and compilation. There exists formalisms and models of most pieces of the puzzle. There are worked examples of certified compilers whose details and sometimes source are available for re-use. There's even already a verified C compiler other works are building on. It was used in EAL7-class JavaCard interpreters, database structures I believe, web services, and so on. Even outputs to robust Ocaml code. People needing to learn this stuff even have free books like Chlipala's:
http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/
So, anyone trying to specify or formally verify compilers or algorithms have plenty of reason to choose Coq. It's actually one of the best tools for the job with HOL or Isabelle the other style. Field kind of diverges doing parallel work with them in imperative verification. Coq is possibly easier to use and seems to have more prior work to draw on in this. So, it's either the best or one of best tools for the job.
TLA+ is for totally different jobs. Not relevant here.
pron has this habit of being negative and dismissive towards functional programming and related things, recommending non-FP alternatives instead. Which is fine, only that sometimes he's too trigger happy and just gives unsolicited advice without any build up or with weak topical relevance. Like here.
But you are right that I sometimes try to correct what I see as a (strange) imbalance here on HN (which reflects neither the prevailing opinions in academia nor in the industry) regarding PFP and type theory. People unfamiliar with the topic might get the impression that PFP+type-theory is either the only or the most prevalent technique for software verification (or software correctness in general), while neither is the case. In exchange, I get to be the lucky target of various ad hominem attacks, so I guess I've earned my right to speak up :)
> TLA+ is for totally different jobs. Not relevant here.
I beg to differ. TLA+ is commonly (as far as the word "commonly" can be used when formal methods are discussed) used to specify and verify programs in C or any other language.
It is true that Coq has been used to verify compilers more than TLA+, while TLA+ has been used to verify algorithms (esp. concurrent/distributed) more than Coq, but the reason is not because neither could do the other's job, but because of their respective progeny. Coq (as all type-theory tools) is closely associated with PL-theory people, who tend to be more attracted to compilers, while TLA+ originated from the software-verification world (mostly Pnueli's temporal logic), and created and promoted by Leslie Lamport, most certainly an "algorithms" (specifically distributed/concurrent) guy rather than a "PL" guy.
BTW, Isabelle is one of the proof engines used by the TLA+ proof system.
TLA+ is an easier intro to verification. However, the verification of C programs to any strong degree will require tools like Coq, possibly esoterica like separation logic, tough specs, tough proofs, and so on. There's no easy route for it for beginners except to straight up learn the necessary knowledge with Chlipala's book, Software Foundations, or something similar. Then plenty of practice and study of how successful work was done.
There's a reason we celebrate every time someone comes close to specifying or verifying a significant chunk of C language. It's because it's Just That Hard (TM). ;)
"I beg to differ. TLA+ is commonly (as far as the word "commonly" can be used when formal methods are discussed) used to specify and verify programs in C or any other language."
Hmm. Interesting. I should probably do another survey of TLA+ to see what uses it's had in sequential, low-level algorithms like the OP post is on. May be more going on than I was previously aware. All the top results are using Coq and Isabelle/HOL, though.
And if this post had appeared on a Coq forum, a verification forum or even LtU, I would have said nothing. However, as this is HN, and there are probably many beginners reading this, I thought it very relevant to point out a more beginner-friendly tool as a foray into this interesting subject.
> what uses it's had in sequential, low-level algorithms
This is a fairly recent paper that describes a tool that translates C to TLA+ for verification: http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/Publis/PAPERS/PDF/MLBHB-ftscs15... It works for concurrent C programs as well as sequential ones.
This is an old (old) spec by Lamport of the Win32 Threads API: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/th...
And again, the choice of TLA+/Coq often has much more to do with the community the author belongs to (PL/conc-dist algorithms) rather than some specific strengths of the tool.
It does support the use of TLA+ for some aspects of C verification or specification along with integrating into the right tool (Frama-C). I'll probably do the re-survey on TLA+ use I mentioned earlier due to this paper.
Can you (or anyone) provide any insight as to why ACL2 doesn't get mentioned much in discussions of formal methods? I'm interested in formal methods and ACL2 seems like a nice tool, but at least on HN all I usually see is Coq this and Coq that, with occasional mentions of TLA+ and Isabelle.
The best work I've seen in ACL2 comes from Rockwell-Collins and their SHADE verification suite. They've verified raw hardware, microcode, processor ISA, security policies, crypto systems... you name it. They give plenty of detail in their papers in how they do that albeit some are paywalled. The resulting AAMP7G processor is used in commercial applications needing reliability and security.
I haven't done a straight survey on ACL2 in a while, though. Might be worth a reader doing and posting in case something interesting was overlooked. Rockwell's stuff seems to be best use of it, though.
Still added it to my collection as it might come in handy for future ACL2 work. :)
Some websites including Hacker News use very small font size. Reddit's font size is bigger. I created a HN web reader ( http://hackernewsroom.com ) with bigger font size (for myself and friends) to read titles and comments easily. But I can't change the font size of the original article. (Have to zoom in the page by pressing cmd+=)
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#length-units
If you have a problem reading text on the screen, I suggest you use something like Clearly extension that reformats pages with a much more reading-friendly style.
You don't have to sign up to use this extension : https://evernote.com/clearly/
You can also try to print the page into a PDF and read it like that.
> If the pixel density of the output device is very different from that of a typical computer display, the user agent should rescale pixel values.
So actually 12px font should look about the same on all output devices, regardless of their physical DPI. But I agree that 12px is rather small for copy text.
I guess a conforming browser should randomly sample computer displays before deciding how big 1px is.
Serious version: I don't think text like that should make it into a standard.
[1]on iceweasel on debian 8 in virtualbox.
Personally I got used to changing the zoom all the time, with the amount of sites that solve the DPI problem by multiplying the size of everything by 2.
[1] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...
Find styles: https://userstyles.org/
> The C11 standard defines the usual arithmetic conversions as a binary operation on integer types. This definition is complicated and contains some implicit duplication due to symmetry, which is inconvenient when proving properties. To improve the situation, we show that the usual arithmetic conversion of integer types τ_i and σ_i is a least upper bound τ_i ∪ σ_i in a join semi-lattice.
Isn't this undecidable?
The halting problem is undecidable, but it's really easy to describe the set of programs that halt. I just described it right there!
That quote is talking about defining the set, not determining whether a program is a member of the set (which is indeed impossible in the general case).