Coq Tutorial at POPL 2008: Using Proof Assistants for Programming Language Research

[Stephanie Weirich <sweirich@cis.upenn.edu>]

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               Tutorial Announcement and Call for Participation


           Using Proof Assistants for Programming Language Research
                                     Or:
                   How to Write Your Next POPL Paper in Coq

                        San Francisco, CA, 8 Jan 2008
                          Co-located with POPL 2008
                           Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN

                     http://plclub.org/popl08-tutorial/

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The University of Pennsylvania PLClub invites you to participate in a
tutorial on using the Coq proof assistant to formalize programming  
language
metatheory.

This tutorial will be tailored to people who are familiar with syntactic
proofs of programming language metatheory (type soundness, etc.), but  
have
never used a proof assistant. At the end of the day, participants  
will have
a reading knowledge of Coq and a running start on using Coq in their own
work.

This tutorial will be hands-on, with breaks for exercises;  
participants are
strongly encouraged to bring a laptop running Coq 8.1 (or a later  
release)
and either Proof General or CoqIDE.

Tutorial topics

   - Defining language semantics in Coq
      - Abstract syntax
      - Inductively-defined relations
      - Derivations
   - Proving simple results
      - Fundamental tactics
      - Automation
      - Forward and backward reasoning
   - Scaling up to POPLmark
      - Semantic functions and conversion
      - Sets and environments
   - Representing binding
      - Locally nameless representation
      - Freshness through cofinite quantification
      - Syntactic type soundness

Registration will be through the POPL 2008 registration site:
	 http://www.regmaster.com/conf/popl2008.html

The tutorial is organized and presented by members of the University of
Pennsylvania PLClub: Brian Aydemir, Aaron Bohannon, Benjamin Pierce,  
Jeffrey
Vaughan, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Stephanie Weirich, and Steve Zdancewic.

Questions can be sent to Stephanie Weirich (sweirich@cis.upenn.edu).