Apply2Isar: Automatically Converting Isabelle/HOL Apply-Style Proofs to Structured Isar
This tool addresses the problem of converting between proof styles for Isabelle/HOL users, offering a way to combine the benefits of both procedural and declarative proof writing.
This paper introduces Apply2Isar, a tool for Isabelle/HOL that converts procedural "apply-style" proof scripts into declarative Isar language proofs. This allows users to leverage the speed of apply-style for exploration while gaining the readability and robustness of Isar for the final proof.
In Isabelle/HOL, declarative proofs written in the Isar language are widely appreciated for their readability and robustness. However, some users may prefer writing procedural "apply-style" proof scripts since they enable rapid exploration of the search space. To get the best of both worlds, we introduce Apply2Isar, a tool for Isabelle/HOL that automatically converts apply-style scripts to declarative Isar. This allows users to write complex, possibly fragile apply-style scripts, and then automatically convert them to more readable and robust declarative Isar proofs. To demonstrate the efficacy of Apply2Isar in practice, we evaluate it on a large benchmark set consisting of apply-style proofs from the Isabelle Archive of Formal Proofs.