Industrial-Strength Documentation for ACL2
This addresses the need for high-quality documentation for teams working on large-scale industrial verification projects using ACL2, though it is incremental as it builds on existing documentation efforts.
The authors tackled the problem of inadequate documentation for the ACL2 theorem prover and its extensive libraries by developing XDOC, a flexible and scalable documentation tool, resulting in a comprehensive, publicly available ACL2+Books Manual and an extended manual for internal use at Centaur Technology.
The ACL2 theorem prover is a complex system. Its libraries are vast. Industrial verification efforts may extend this base with hundreds of thousands of lines of additional modeling tools, specifications, and proof scripts. High quality documentation is vital for teams that are working together on projects of this scale. We have developed XDOC, a flexible, scalable documentation tool for ACL2 that can incorporate the documentation for ACL2 itself, the Community Books, and an organization's internal formal verification projects, and which has many features that help to keep the resulting manuals up to date. Using this tool, we have produced a comprehensive, publicly available ACL2+Books Manual that brings better documentation to all ACL2 users. We have also developed an extended manual for use within Centaur Technology that extends the public manual to cover Centaur's internal books. We expect that other organizations using ACL2 will wish to develop similarly extended manuals.