Ergo 6: a Generic Proof Engine That Uses Prolog Proof Technology

To support formal reasoning in mathematical and software engineering applications, it is desirable to have a generic prover that can be instantiated with a range of logics. This allows the prover to be applied to a wider variety of reasoning tasks than a fixed-logic prover. This paper describes the design principles and the architecture of the latest version of the Ergo proof engine, Ergo 6. Ergo 6 is a generic interactive theorem prover, similar to Isabelle, but with better support for proving schematic theorems with user-defined constraints, and with a different approach to handling variable scoping. A major theme of the paper is that Prolog implementation technology can be generalized to obtain efficient implementations of generic proof engines. This is demonstrated via a Qu-Prolog implementation of Ergo 6.