coq VS coq-serapi

The page summarizing the considered new names and their pros/cons is interesting: https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

Naming is hard...

Are those more important than, say:

- Proven with Coq, a formal proof management system: https://coq.inria.fr/

See in the real world: https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/

And check out Computer-Aided Verification (CAV).

To be ruthlessly, uselessly pedantic - after all, we're mathematicians - there's reasonable definitions of "academic" where logical unsoundness is still academic if it never interfered with the reasoning behind any proofs of interest ;)

But: so long as we're accepting that unsoundness in your checker or its underlying theory are intrinsically deal breakers, there's definitely a long history of this, perhaps more somewhat more relevant than the HM example, since no proof checkers of note, AFAIK, have incorporated mutation into their type theory.

For one thing, the implementation can very easily have bugs. Coq itself certainly has had soundness bugs occasionally [0]. I'm sure Agda, Lean, Idris, etc. have too, but I've followed them less closely.

But even the underlying mathematics have been tricky. Girard's Paradox broke Martin-Löf's type theory, which is why in these dependently typed proof assistants you have to deal with the bizarre "Tower of Universes"; and Girard's Paradox is an analogue of Russell's Paradox which broke more naive set theories. And then Russell himself and his system of universal mathematics was very famously struck down by Gödel.

But we've definitely gotten it right this time...

[0] https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/4294

Dafny and Whiley are two examples with explicit verification support. Idris and other dependently typed languages should all be rich enough to express the required predicate but might not necessarily be able to accept a reasonable implementation as proof. Isabelle, Lean, Coq, and other theorem provers definitely can express the capability but aren't going to churn out much in the way of executable programs; they're more useful to guide an implementation in a more practical functional language but then the proof is separated from the implementation, and you could also use tools like TLA+.

https://dafny.org/

https://whiley.org/

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://isabelle.in.tum.de/

https://leanprover.github.io/

https://coq.inria.fr/

http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

Still, there are many useful tools based on these ideas, used by programmers and mathematicians alike. What you describe sounds rather like Datalog (e.g. Soufflé Datalog), where you supply some rules and an initial fact, and the system repeatedly expands out the set of facts until nothing new can be derived. (This has to be finite, if you want to get anywhere.) In Prolog (e.g. SWI Prolog) you also supply a set of rules and facts, but instead of a fact as your starting point, you give a query containing some unknown variables, and the system tries to find an assignment of the variables that proves the query. And finally there is a rich array of theorem provers and proof assistants such as Agda, Coq, Lean, and Twelf, which can all be used to help check your reasoning or explore new ideas.

What ever happened to the effort [1] to rename Coq in order to make it less offensive? There were a number of excellent proposals [2] that seemed to die on the vine.

[1] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

[2] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names#c%E1%B5%A3...

Information about the Coq proof assistant: https://coq.inria.fr/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq

This type of thing can help you formally verify code.

So, if your proof is correct, and your description of the (language/CPU) is correct, you can prove the code does what you think it does.

Formal proof systems are still growing up, though, and they are still pretty hard to use. See Coq for an introduction: https://coq.inria.fr/

Most of the proof assistants out there: Lean, Coq, Dafny, Isabelle, F*, Idris 2, and Agda. And the main concepts are dependent types, Homotopy Type Theory AKA HoTT, and Category Theory. Warning: HoTT and Category Theory are really dense, you're going to really need to research them.

It's a question I hadn't really considered before. On first pass, as far as I know, I'd say the answer is no. It isn't clear to me what the objective of embedding Coq with a C api for example would be. The very core of Coq is about verifying proofs and not producing them and I'm not sure what the benefit of embedding it is.

Having said that there are a few projects that may be something like what you're asking. First off, Coq has the SerAPI project https://github.com/ejgallego/coq-serapi through which external programs can talk to coq. This has been used for example to make a python OpenAi gym like interface https://github.com/princeton-vl/CoqGym.

A different direction might be something like MetaMath Zero https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10703 which is intended to be a small and fast verifier for it's language, perhaps maybe someday for embedding in applications. There is this notion of "Proof Carrying Code" which I don't really know what the current state of the art is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-carrying_code One might want an easily embeddable trusted verifier for that purpose. I don't know.