Autosubst: On Mechanising Binders in a General-Purpose Proof Assistant (Invited Talk)

Abstract

The question of handling binders effectively regularly comes up when mechanising results in a proof assistant. Since the beginning of proof assistants, many solutions have been suggested: these include de Bruijn syntax, locally nameless binders, nominal syntax or HOAS. But even today - 20 years after the POPLMark Challenge [Brian E. Aydemir et al., 2005] - new tools and approaches to binding are still being published. Binders are still mentioned as being a complication of mechanised proofs over pen-and-paper proofs and the source of uninteresting technicalities and heaps of boilerplate - particularly, when working in a proof assistant without native support for binders or quotients.
Autosubst [Steven Schäfer et al., 2015; Steven Schäfer et al., 2015], initially developed a decade ago as a teaching tool, addresses this problem by automating boilerplate code generation for a de Bruijn representation in the Rocq prover. Autosubst translates a specification into the corresponding pure or scoped de Bruijn algebra: It hence generates a corresponding instantiation operation for parallel substitutions, and several equational substitution lemmas. Central to its usability is a rewriting tactic that automatically decides equality up to substitutions, requiring minimal input and knowledge from the user’s side. This greatly simplifies using the otherwise notoriously difficult de Bruijn representation. Since then, Autosubst has been successfully used in several projects.
In this talk, I will give an overview of the background and history of Autosubst and give an overview on the work, tools, and formalisations around it [Kathrin Stark et al., 2019; Kathrin Stark, 2020; Andreas Abel et al., 2019]. Moreover, this talk will highlight some of the more recent extensions [Yannick Forster and Kathrin Stark, 2020] as well as outline future challenges and directions.