From urbanc at in.tum.de  Fri Mar 28 01:28:14 2008
From: urbanc at in.tum.de (Christian Urban)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 06:28:14 +0100
Subject: [POPLmark] One-Day Tutorial on Nominal Isabelle at IJCAR 2008
Message-ID: <20080328052822.D93EA6D8BAC@talisker.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de>


Stealing a brilliant idea from the PLClub at UPenn, I am
happy to announce there will be a tutorial on Nominal
Isabelle at IJCAR 2008 (see announcement below). If you have 
missed their excellent Coq-workshop at POPL, then this is 
your second chance for a tutorial about using a proof assistant 
for mechanising metatheory. If you have have been there, then 
this tutorial will demonstrate an alternative approach to 
writing POPL papers. ;o)

Best wishes,
Christian Urban




One-Day Tutorial on Nominal Isabelle at IJCAR 2008
--------------------------------------------------

Time: 11th August (just before main conference) 
Location: Sydney, Australia. 


Overview:

Dealing with binders, renaming of bound variables, capture-avoiding
substitution, etc., is very often a major problem in formal proofs about the
lambda-calculus and programming language theory. Nominal Isabelle provides an
infrastructure for reasoning conveniently about bound variables and
alpha-equivalence classes in the proof assistant Isabelle. The aim of this
tutorial is to give participants a reading knowledge of nominal techniques and
allow them to start using Nominal Isabelle in their own work. The tutorial
will be hands-on and therefore participants are encouraged to bring their own
laptop.


Programme:

The tutorial will be organised around four sessions: 

Session I:   basics, substitution lemma, Isar proof language 
Session II:  strong induction principles, contexts with holes, beta-reduction 
Session III: variable convention and rule inductions, evaluation relation 
Session IV:  function definitions, freshness, support 


Target audience for the tutorial:

Researchers and doctoral students who want to use Nominal Isabelle to
formalise proofs from the lambda-calculus, from programming language theory or
from proof theory, such as type soundness, Church Rosser, strong normalisation
and so on. The tutorial is designed for people who have not necessarily used
Isabelle or Nominal Isabelle before, nor have used any other proof assistant. 


HTML version of this announcement:

http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/nominal-ijcar08/