The genesis of this special issue was in a meeting that took place at Université Paris Diderot on December 15 and 16, 2016. Dale Miller, Professor at École polytechnique, had turned 60 a few days earlier. In a career spanning over three decades and in work conducted in collaboration with several students and colleagues, Dale had had a significant influence in an area that can be described as structural proof theory and its application to computation and reasoning. In recognition of this fact, several of his collaborators thought it appropriate to celebrate the occasion by organizing a symposium on topics broadly connected to his areas of interest and achievements. The meeting was a success in several senses: it was attended by over 35 people, there were 15 technical presentations describing new results, and, quite gratifyingly, we managed to spring the event as a complete surprise to Dale.

Herbrand’s theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view, it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logics by recording the information of which instances have been chosen for which quantifiers. This compact representation is known in the literature as Miller’s expansion tree proof. It is inherently analytic and hence corresponds to a cut-free sequent calculus proof. Recently several extensions of such proof representations to proofs with cuts have been proposed. These extensions are based on graphical formalisms similar to proof nets and are limited to prenex formulas.

In this paper, we present a new syntactic approach that directly extends Miller’s expansion trees by cuts and also covers non-prenex formulas. We describe a cut-elimination procedure for our expansion trees with cut that is based on the natural reduction steps and shows that it is weakly normalizing.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of expansion tree for linear logic. As in Miller's original work, we have a shallow reading of an expansion tree that corresponds to the conclusion of the proof, and a deep reading which is a formula that can be proved by propositional rules. We focus our attention to MLL2, and we also present a deep inference system for that logic. This allows us to give a syntactic proof to a version of Herbrand's theorem.

Resolution and sequent calculus are two well-known formal proof systems. Their differences make them suitable for distinct tasks. Resolution and its variants are very efficient for automated reasoning and are in fact the theoretical basis of many theorem provers. However, being intentionally machine oriented, the resolution calculus is not as natural for human beings and the input problem needs to be pre-processed to clause normal form. Sequent calculus, on the other hand, is a modular formalism that is useful for analysing meta-properties of various logics and is, therefore, popular among proof theorists. The input problem does not need to be pre-processed, and proofs are more detailed. However, proofs also tend to be larger and more verbose. When the worlds of proof theory and automated theorem proving meet, translations between resolution and sequent calculus are often necessary. In this paper, we compare three translation methods and analyse their complexity.

A new approach to inhabitation problems in simply typed lambda-calculus is shown, dealing with both decision and counting problems. This approach works by exploiting a representation of the search space generated by a given inhabitation problem, which is in terms of a lambda-calculus for proof search that the authors developed recently. The representation may be seen as extending the Curry–Howard representation of proofs by lambda terms. Our methodology reveals inductive descriptions of the decision problems, driven by the syntax of the proof-search expressions, and produces simple, recursive decision procedures and counting functions. These allow to predict the number of inhabitants by testing the given type for syntactic criteria. This new approach is comprehensive and robust: based on the same syntactic representation, we also derive the state-of-the-art coherence theorems ensuring uniqueness of inhabitants.

In this paper, we are interested in high-level programming languages to implement the core components of an interactive theorem prover for a dependently typed language: the kernel – responsible for type-checking closed terms – and the elaborator – that manipulates open terms, that is terms containing unresolved unification variables.

In this paper, we confirm that λProlog, the language developed by Miller and Nadathur since the 80s, is extremely suitable for implementing the kernel. Indeed, we easily obtain a type checker for the Calculus of Inductive Constructions (CIC). Even more, we do so in an incremental way by escalating a checker for a pure type system to the full CIC.

We then turn our attention to the elaborator with the objective to obtain a simple implementation thanks to the features of the programming language. In particular, we want to use λProlog’s unification variables to model the object language ones. In this way, scope checking, carrying of assignments and occur checking are handled by the programming language.

We observe that the eager generative semantics inherited from Prolog clashes with this plan. We propose an extension to λProlog that allows to control the generative semantics, suspend goals over flexible terms turning them into constraints, and finally manipulate these constraints at the meta-meta level via constraint handling rules.

We implement the proposed language extension in the Embedded Lambda Prolog Interpreter system and we discuss how it can be used to extend the kernel into an elaborator for CIC.

HyLL (Hybrid Linear Logic) is an extension of intuitionistic linear logic (ILL) that has been used as a framework for specifying systems that exhibit certain modalities. In HyLL, truth judgements are labelled by worlds (having a monoidal structure) and hybrid connectives (at and ↓) relate worlds with formulas. We start this work by showing that HyLL's axioms and rules can be adequately encoded in linear logic (LL), so that one focused step in LL will correspond to a step of derivation in HyLL. This shows that any proof in HyLL can be exactly mimicked by a LL focused derivation. Another extension of LL that has extensively been used for specifying systems with modalities is Subexponential Linear Logic (SELL). In SELL, the LL exponentials (!, ?) are decorated with labels representing locations, and a pre-order on such labels defines the provability relation. We propose an encoding of HyLL into SELL⋒ (SELL plus quantification over locations) that gives better insights about the meaning of worlds in HyLL. More precisely, we identify worlds as locations, and show that a flat subexponential structure is sufficient for representing any world structure in HyLL. This shows that HyLL's monoidal structure is not reflected in LL derivations, hence not increasing the expressiveness of LL, from a proof theoretical point of view. We conclude by proposing the notion of fixed points in multiplicative additive HyLL (μHyMALL), which can be encoded into multiplicative additive linear logic with fixed points (μMALL). As an application, we propose encodings of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) into both μMALL and μHyMALL. In the former, states are represented as atoms in the linear context, hence reflecting a more operational view of CTL connectives. In the latter, worlds represent states of the transition system, thus exhibiting a pleasant similarity with the semantics of CTL.

This article presents a unified logic that combines classical logic, intuitionistic logic and affine linear logic (restricting contraction but not weakening). We show that this unification can be achieved semantically, syntactically and in the computational interpretation of proofs. It extends our previous work in combining classical and intuitionistic logics. Compared to linear logic, classical fragments of proofs are better isolated from non-classical fragments. We define a phase semantics for this logic that naturally extends the Kripke semantics of intuitionistic logic. We present a sequent calculus with novel structural rules, which entail a more elaborate procedure for cut elimination. Computationally, this system allows affine-linear interpretations of proofs to be combined with classical interpretations, such as the λμ calculus. We show how cut elimination must respect the boundaries between classical and non-classical modes of proof that correspond to delimited control effects.

Linear logical frameworks with subexponentials have been used for the specification of, among other systems, proof systems, concurrent programming languages and linear authorisation logics. In these frameworks, subexponentials can be configured to allow or not for the application of the contraction and weakening rules while the exchange rule can always be applied. This means that formulae in such frameworks can only be organised as sets and multisets of formulae not being possible to organise formulae as lists of formulae. This paper investigates the proof theory of linear logic proof systems in the non-commutative variant. These systems can disallow the application of exchange rule on some subexponentials. We investigate conditions for when cut elimination is admissible in the presence of non-commutative subexponentials, investigating the interaction of the exchange rule with the local and non-local contraction rules. We also obtain some new undecidability and decidability results on non-commutative linear logic with subexponentials.

We give a semantics for a classical variant of Dale Miller and Alwen Tiu’s logic FOλ∇. Our semantics validates the rule that nabla x implies exists x, but is otherwise faithful to the authors’ original intentions. The semantics is based on a category of so-called nabla sets, which are simply strictly increasing sequences of non-empty sets. We show that the logic is sound for that semantics. Assuming there is a unique base type ι, we show that it is complete for Henkin structures, incomplete for standard structures in general, but complete for standard structures in the case of Π1 formulae, and that includes all first-order formulae.

This paper clarifies that linear implication defines a branching-time preorder, preserved in all contexts, when used to compare embeddings of process in non-commutative logic. The logic considered is a first-order extension of the proof system BV featuring a de Morgan dual pair of nominal quantifiers, called BV1. An embedding of π-calculus processes as formulae in BV1 is defined, and the soundness of linear implication in BV1 with respect to a notion of weak simulation in the π -calculus is established. A novel contribution of this work is that we generalise the notion of a ‘left proof’ to a class of formulae sufficiently large to compare embeddings of processes, from which simulating execution steps are extracted. We illustrate the expressive power of BV1 by demonstrating that results extend to the internal π -calculus, where privacy of inputs is guaranteed. We also remark that linear implication is strictly finer than any interleaving preorder.

Bisimulation proofs play a central role in programming languages in establishing rich properties such as contextual equivalence. They are also challenging to mechanize, since they require a combination of inductive and coinductive reasoning on open terms. In this paper, we describe mechanizing the property that similarity in the call-by-name lambda calculus is a pre-congruence using Howe’s method in the Beluga formal reasoning system. The development relies on three key ingredients: (1) we give a higher order abstract syntax (HOAS) encoding of lambda terms together with their operational semantics as intrinsically typed terms, thereby avoiding not only the need to deal with binders, renaming and substitutions, but keeping all typing invariants implicit; (2) we take advantage of Beluga’s support for representing open terms using built-in contexts and simultaneous substitutions: this allows us to directly state central definitions such as open simulation without resorting to the usual inductive closure operation and to encode very elegantly notoriously painful proofs such as the substitutivity of the Howe relation; (3) we exploit the possibility of reasoning by coinduction in Beluga’s reasoning logic. The end result is succinct and elegant, thanks to the high-level abstractions and primitives Beluga provides. We believe that this mechanization is a significant example that illustrates Beluga’s strength at mechanizing challenging (co)inductive proofs using HOAS encodings.

One of the main issues in proof certification is that different theorem provers, even when designed for the same logic, tend to use different proof formalisms and produce outputs in different formats. The project ProofCert promotes the usage of a common specification language and of a small and trusted kernel in order to check proofs coming from different sources and for different logics. By relying on that idea and by using a classical focused sequent calculus as a kernel, we propose here a general framework for checking modal proofs. We present the implementation of the framework in a Prolog-like language and show how it is possible to specialize it in a simple and modular way in order to cover different proof formalisms, such as labelled systems, tableaux, sequent calculi and nested sequent calculi. We illustrate the method for the logic K by providing several examples and discuss how to further extend the approach.