In McLTT, we build a verified, runnable typechecker for Martin-Löf type theory. After the accomplishment of this project, we will obtain an executable, to which we can feed a program in Martin-Loef type theory, and this executable will check whether this program has the specified type. McLTT is novel in that it is implemented in Coq. Moreover, we will prove that the typechecking algorithm extracted from Coq is sound and complete: a program passes typechecking if and only if it is a well-typed program in MLTT. This will be the first verified proof assistant (despite being elementary) and serves as a basis for future extensions.
McLTT has the following architecture:
| source code of McLTT
v
+-------+
| lexer | OCaml code generated by ocamllex
+-------+
| stream of tokens
v
+--------+
| parser | Coq code generated by Menhir
+--------+
| concrete syntax tree
v
+------------+
| elaborator | Coq code
+------------+
| abstract syntax tree
v
+-------------+
| typechecker | Coq code
| (normalizer |
| included) |
+-------------+
| yes or no Driver in OCaml
v
In this architecture, most code is in Coq, with accompanying theorems to justify the implementation.
We recommend to install dependencies in the following way:
opam switch create coq-8.17.1 4.14.1
opam install menhir
opam pin add coq 8.17.1
opam repo add coq-released https://coq.inria.fr/opam/released
opam install coq-equations
opam install coq-menhirlib
opam install ppx_inline_test
Before anything, the Coq parser must be extracted to OCaml code. Then, you can run dune build
like normal for all other changes.
You can build changes to the Coq parser with the following commands:
make gen_parser
dune build
Then you can interact with the parser at the toplevel with dune utop
:
# open Mcltt;;
# open Parser.Cst;;
# Main.parse "<expression to parse>"