[Agda] proof by AC-reduction
Serge D. Mechveliani
mechvel at botik.ru
Tue Feb 19 15:50:26 CET 2013
Dear Agda users and developers,
I find that programming proofs in Agda is rather difficult.
Most simple `human' proof usually need a great effort to encode them in
Agda. This also pollutes the source code with lengthy proofs which in
reality could be written somewhat 50 times shorter by calling some
library function.
Am I missing something?
Do other Agda programmers suffer of composing manually proofs which are
intuitively trivial?
I see the following main reason of why many simple proofs are complex to
build for Agda.
For example, such laws (for Group) as
unityLaw : \forall x (e * x) ~~ x
invLaw : \forall x (x * (inv x)) ~~ e
(I write here ~~ for \~~)
(if they present in a program) are not applied automatically in the
type normalization.
The same is for possible laws of ~~sym, ~~trans, *cong, *assoc, *comm.
Indeed, in the generic case, they need not to apply automatically.
But for many special cases they are desirable to apply automatically,
only by a certain special strategy.
In such cases one probably needs to apply such a tool as
Equational prover based on Many-sorted Term Rewriting
(unification, matching, reduction, AC-unification,
AC-reduction, completion ...).
(AC stands for ``Associative and Commutative'').
Agda needs some proof assistants provided as additional libraries
(some of them may be even in the Standard library).
(1) The simplest variant is Equality proof by Term Rewriting
(and without induction),
in particular, by AC-unification, AC-reduction.
(2) A support for inductive proofs is desirable.
I expect that Coq has something essential for (2), and may be, for (1).
What Agda has for (1), (2) ?
The letter
http://botik.ru/pub/local/Mechveliani/agdaNotes/assistant.agda.zip
(about 180 lines)
1) provides a short proof example of a messy proof,
2) describes a certain naive project of how to automatically build proofs
(in appropriate special cases) by applying AC-reduction.
"Apply AC reduction, obtain its trace and convert the trace to the
sequence of ~~sym, ~~trans, *assoc, *comm, and some others".
There exists a certain Many-sorted Equational reasoning library written
in Haskell which can do AC reduction (and completion too) with returnig
the trace. And the current Agda implemantation is somewhat compatible
with Haskell.
May such a construction have sense for Agda?
Can you, please, look into the letter on the web and issue your notes?
Thanks,
------
Sergei
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