Coq

For the coenzyme and dietary supplement, see Coenzyme Q10.
For the abbreviated placename, see Coquihalla.
Coq (software)
Developer(s) The Coq development team
Initial release May 1, 1989 (1989-05-01) (version 4.10)
Stable release 8.5 / January 2016 (2016-01)
Development status Active
Written in OCaml
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in English
Type Proof assistant
License LGPL 2.1
Website coq.inria.fr
Coq (programming language)
Paradigm Functional
First appeared 1984[1]
Typing discipline static, strong
Filename extensions .v
Website coq.inria.fr
Dialects
LEGO (proof assistant)
Influenced by
ML (programming), LCF (proof methods), Automath (hybrid programming/proving), System F and intuitionistic type theory (language)
Influenced
Agda, Idris, Matita, Albatross
An interactive proof session in CoqIDE, showing the proof script on the left and the proof state on the right.

In computer science, Coq is an interactive theorem prover. It allows the expression of mathematical assertions, mechanically checks proofs of these assertions, helps to find formal proofs, and extracts a certified program from the constructive proof of its formal specification. Coq works within the theory of the calculus of inductive constructions, a derivative of the calculus of constructions. Coq is not an automated theorem prover but includes automatic theorem proving tactics and various decision procedures.

The Association for Computing Machinery presented Coquand, Huet, Paulin-Mohring, Barras, Filliâtre, Herbelin, Murthy, Bertot, Castéran with the 2013 ACM Software System Award for Coq.

Overview

Seen as a programming language, Coq implements a dependently typed functional programming language,[2] while seen as a logical system, it implements a higher-order type theory. The development of Coq is supported since 1984 by INRIA, now in collaboration with École Polytechnique, University of Paris-Sud, Paris Diderot University and CNRS. In the 90's, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon was also part of the project. The development of Coq has been initiated by Gérard Huet and Thierry Coquand, after which more than 40 people, mainly researchers, contributed features of the core system. The implementation team has been successively coordinated by Gérard Huet, Christine Paulin and Hugo Herbelin. Coq is for the most part implemented in OCaml with a bit of C. The core system can be extended thanks to a mechanism of plug-ins.

The word coq means "rooster" in French, and stems from a local tradition of naming French research development tools with animal names.[3] Up to 1991, Coquand was implementing a language called the Calculus of Constructions and it was simply called CoC at this time. In 1991, a new implementation based on the extended Calculus of Inductive Constructions was started and the name changed from CoC to Coq, also an indirect reference to Thierry Coquand who developed the Calculus of Constructions along with Gérard Huet and the Calculus of Inductive Constructions along with Christine Paulin.

Coq provides a specification language called Gallina[4](that means hen in spanish). Programs written in Gallina have the weak normalization property – they always terminate. This is one way to avoid the halting problem. This may be surprising, since infinite loops (non-termination) are common in other programming languages. [5]

Four color theorem and ssreflect extension

Georges Gonthier (of Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, England) and Benjamin Werner (of INRIA) used Coq to create a surveyable proof of the four color theorem, which was completed in September 2004.[6]

Based on this work, a significant extension to Coq was developed called Ssreflect (which stands for "small scale reflection").[7] Despite the name, most of the new features added to Coq by Ssreflect are general purpose features, useful not merely for the computational reflection style of proof. These include:

Ssreflect 1.4 is freely available dual-licensed under the open source CeCILL-B or CeCILL-2.0 license, and is compatible with Coq 8.4.[8]

Applications

See also

References

  1. ↑ What is Coq ? | The Coq Proof Assistant. Coq.inria.fr. Retrieved on 2013-07-21.
  2. ↑ A short introduction to Coq,
  3. ↑ Coq Version 8.0 for the Clueless (174 Hints). Flint.cs.yale.edu. Retrieved on 2013-11-07.
  4. ↑ Adam Chlipala. "Certified Programming with Dependent Types": "Library Universes".
  5. ↑ Adam Chlipala. "Certified Programming with Dependent Types": "Library GeneralRec". "Library InductiveTypes".
  6. ↑ Development of theories and tactics: Four Color Theorem
  7. ↑ Georges Gonthier, Assia Mahboubi. "An introduction to small scale reflection in Coq": "Journal of Formalized Reasoning".
  8. ↑ "Ssreflect 1.4 has been released – Microsoft Research Inria Joint Centre". Msr-inria.fr. Retrieved 2014-01-27.
  9. ↑ Conchon, Sylvain; Filliâtre, Jean-Christophe (October 2007), "A Persistent Union-Find Data Structure", ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on ML, Freiburg, Germany
  10. ↑ "Feit-Thompson theorem has been totally checked in Coq". Msr-inria.inria.fr. 2012-09-20. Retrieved 2012-09-25.
  11. ↑ Gonthier, Georges (2008), "Formal Proof—The Four-Color Theorem" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society 55 (11), pp. 1382–1393, MR 2463991

External links

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