Isabelle

[iz-uh-bel] /ˈɪz əˌbɛl/

noun
1.
a female given name.

fem. proper name, a form of Elizabeth that seems to have developed in Provence. A popular name in Middle Ages; pet forms included Ibb, Libbe, Nibb, Tibb, Bibby, and Ellice. The Spanish form was Isabella, which is attested as a color name (“greyish-yellow”) from 1600; the Isabella who gave her name to it has not been identified. Related: Isabelline.
theory, tool
A generic theorem prover with support for several object-logics, developed by Lawrence C. Paulson [email protected] in collaboration with Tobias Nipkow (http://in.tum.de/~nipkow/) at the Technical University of Munich.
A system of type classes allows polymorphic object-logics with overloading and automatic type inference.
Isabelle supports first-order logic – constructive and classical versions; higher-order logic, similar to Gordon’s HOL; Zermelo Fränkel set theory; an extensional version of Martin Löf’s type theory, the classical first-order sequent calculus, LK; the modal logics T, S4, and S43; and Logic for Computable Functions.
An object logic’s syntax and inference rules are specified declaratively allowing single-step proof construction. Proof procedures can be expressed using “tactics” and “tacticals”. Isabelle provides control structures for expressing search procedures and generic tools such as simplifiers and classical theorem provers which can be applied to object-logics. Isabelle is built on top of Standard ML and uses its user interface.
(http://cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/Isabelle/).
Mailing list: [email protected].
[“tactics”? “tacticals”?]
(1999-07-26)