Reasoning with Higher-Order Abstract Syntax in a Logical Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a meta-logic for reasoning about higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) in logical frameworks, enabling formal proofs of properties like determinacy and type preservation in programming language semantics.

Contribution

It presents a novel meta-logic extension that facilitates reasoning about HOAS encodings, overcoming previous limitations in formal analysis and proof development.

Findings

Formal derivation of cut admissibility for key logics

Proofs of unicity of typing and subject reduction

Verification of evaluation determinacy and semantic equivalence

Abstract

Logical frameworks based on intuitionistic or linear logics with higher-type quantification have been successfully used to give high-level, modular, and formal specifications of many important judgments in the area of programming languages and inference systems. Given such specifications, it is natural to consider proving properties about the specified systems in the framework: for example, given the specification of evaluation for a functional programming language, prove that the language is deterministic or that evaluation preserves types. One challenge in developing a framework for such reasoning is that higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS), an elegant and declarative treatment of object-level abstraction and substitution, is difficult to treat in proofs involving induction. In this paper, we present a meta-logic that can be used to reason about judgments coded using HOAS; this meta-logic is an extension of a simple intuitionistic logic that admits higher-order quantification over simply typed lambda-terms (key ingredients for HOAS) as well as induction and a notion of definition. We explore the difficulties of formal meta-theoretic analysis of HOAS encodings by considering encodings of intuitionistic and linear logics, and formally derive the admissibility of cut for important subsets of these logics. We then propose an approach to avoid the apparent tradeoff between the benefits of higher-order abstract syntax and the ability to analyze the resulting encodings. We illustrate this approach through examples involving the simple functional and imperative programming languages PCF and PCF:=. We formally derive such properties as unicity of typing, subject reduction, determinacy of evaluation, and the equivalence of transition semantics and natural semantics presentations of evaluation.