Writing Literate Proofs with XML Tools

Both mechanical proof scripts and programs benefit from documentation and modularity. Designed to be an industrial-strength theorem prover, ACL2 provides powerful support for both of these. The standard distribution includes hundreds of pages of documentation that are automatically generated from function doc-strings in the source code. However, it is still difficult to write easily understandable proof scripts. We need a way to communicate proof scripts to a future human reader, not just to a mechanical theorem prover. Literate programming offers a solution to the analogous problem for computer programs. We describe how the same techniques can be applied to proof scripts.