Fiat: Deductive Synthesis of Abstract Data Types in a Proof Assistant
Author(s)
Delaware, Benjamin James; Pit-Claudel, Clément; Gross, Jason S.; Chlipala, Adam
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We present Fiat, a library for the Coq proof assistant supporting refinement of declarative specifications into efficient functional programs with a high degree of automation. Each refinement process leaves a proof trail, checkable by the normal Coq kernel, justifying its soundness. We focus on the synthesis of abstract data types that package methods with private data. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by applying it to the synthesis of query structures--abstract data types with SQL-like query and insert operations. Fiat includes a library for writing specifications of query structures in SQL-inspired notation, expressing operations over relations (tables) in terms of mathematical sets. This library includes a suite of tactics for automating the refinement of specifications into efficient, correct- by-construction OCaml code. Using these tactics, a programmer can generate such an implementation completely automatically by only specifying the equivalent of SQL indexes, data structures capturing useful views of the abstract data. Throughout we speculate on the new programming modularity possibilities enabled by an automated refinement system with proved-correct rules. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”--Michelangelo
Date issued
2015-01Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2015
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Delaware, Benjamin, Clément Pit-Claudel, Jason Gross, and Adam Chlipala. "Fiat: Deductive Synthesis of Abstract Data Types in a Proof Assistant." POPL 2015: 42nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, January 12-18, 2015.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
978-1-4503-3300-9