Extracting total Amb programs from proofs

Abstract

We present a logical system CFP (Concurrent Fixed Point Logic) that supports the extraction of nondeterministic and concurrent programs that are provably total and correct. CFP is an intuitionistic first-order logic with inductive and coinductive definitions extended by two propositional operators, B|A (restriction, a strengthening of implication) and ⇊(B) (total concurrency). The source of the extraction are formal CFP proofs, the target is a lambda calculus with constructors and recursion extended by a constructor Amb (for McCarthy’s amb) which is interpreted operationally as globally angelic choice and is used to implement nondeterminism and concurrency. The correctness of extracted programs is proven via an intermediate domain-theoretic denotational semantics. We demonstrate the usefulness of our system by extracting a nondeterministic program that translates infinite Gray code into the signed digit representation. A noteworthy feature of our system is that the proof rules for restriction and concurrency involve variants of the classical law of excluded middle that would not be interpretable computationally without Amb.