Industrial-Strength Documentation for ACL2

TL;DR

This paper introduces XDOC, a scalable documentation tool for ACL2 that supports comprehensive, maintainable manuals for the theorem prover, its community libraries, and organizational projects, enhancing collaboration and understanding.

Contribution

The paper presents XDOC, a new flexible documentation system for ACL2 that integrates various sources and facilitates up-to-date, extensive manuals for both public and internal use.

Findings

Created a comprehensive ACL2+Books Manual

Developed an extended manual for Centaur Technology

Enhanced documentation quality and maintainability

Abstract

The ACL2 theorem prover is a complex system. Its libraries are vast. Industrial verification efforts may extend this base with hundreds of thousands of lines of additional modeling tools, specifications, and proof scripts. High quality documentation is vital for teams that are working together on projects of this scale. We have developed XDOC, a flexible, scalable documentation tool for ACL2 that can incorporate the documentation for ACL2 itself, the Community Books, and an organization's internal formal verification projects, and which has many features that help to keep the resulting manuals up to date. Using this tool, we have produced a comprehensive, publicly available ACL2+Books Manual that brings better documentation to all ACL2 users. We have also developed an extended manual for use within Centaur Technology that extends the public manual to cover Centaur's internal books. We expect that other organizations using ACL2 will wish to develop similarly extended manuals.