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A Formalized General Theory of Syntax with Bindings: Extended Version

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Abstract

We present the formalization of a theory of syntax with bindings that has been developed and refined over the last decade to support several large formalization efforts. Terms are defined for an arbitrary number of constructors of varying numbers of inputs, quotiented to alpha-equivalence and sorted according to a binding signature. The theory contains a rich collection of properties of the standard operators on terms, including substitution, swapping and freshness—namely, there are lemmas showing how each of the operators interacts with all the others and with the syntactic constructors. The theory also features induction and recursion principles and support for semantic interpretation, all tailored for smooth interaction with the bindings and the standard operators.

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Notes

  1. On the other hand, some authors have shown that, using a clever bookkeeping of the free and bound variables, several constructions, including parallel substitution, can work smoothly on quasiterms [87, 103].

  2. This is a contrived example, where no “real” recursion occurs—but it illustrates the point.

  3. Note that requiring \(|{\textsf {vars}}{\textsf {Of}}\;p| < |\mathbf{var}|\) is the same as requiring that \({\textsf {vars}}{\textsf {Of}}\;p\) be finite.

  4. The formalization work mentioned in this paragraph is mostly unpublished, although aspects concerning the involved recursive definitions are discussed in [89, 91]. Our recent draft [45] gives a detailed account of (an updated version of) the Church-Rosser and Standardization developments.

  5. This work was the first entry in the (today very prolific) IsaFoL project [57].

  6. Here, by “code generator” we refer to a tool for producing code (definitions, theorems and proofs) in a proof assistant, not in a programming language.

  7. However, any generic development, even in dependent type theory, seems to require some code generation in order to offer truly usable instances—as explained, e.g., by the authors of GMeta [64, §3.1].

  8. The difficulties of achieving this with nominal logic recursion are analyzed in [84, §6.3].

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    Lorenzo Gheri & Andrei Popescu

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Gheri, L., Popescu, A. A Formalized General Theory of Syntax with Bindings: Extended Version. J Autom Reasoning 64, 641–675 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-019-09522-2

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