Inductive Predicates

keyword: pred/copred

copred a : foo -> prop :=
  a x & b (f x) => a (s x);
  a 0
and b : bar -> prop := ....

Each rhs should start with the defined predicate and contain no other occurrence of the predicates being defined.

Flag well-founded (or variant wf-pred / wf-copred) as an option/attribute. For well-founded predicates, encoding straightforward (turn into a rec definition, then encoding of rec functions).

not well-founded: add an argument (of type nat) that decreases at each call:

pred even n :=
  even 0;
  even n => even n;
  even n => even (s (s n)).

# use even
p (even n0).

becomes, with an approximation of depth k:

wf-pred even k n :=
  even 0 _ = false;  # we start at 1
  even (s k) 0;
  even k n => even (s k) n;
  even k n => even (s k) (s (s n)).

val k0: nat.

# use even:
p (even k0 n0).

and then we can reverse the definition and turn it into a recursive function.

definition	+	-	±
wf-pred	rec	rec	rec
pred	unroll	rec	guard
copred	rec	co-unroll	guard

where:

• unroll means using the additional k argument, then same as rec
• co-unroll is the same as unroll but the 0 case is true, not false
• rec means the usual encoding of recursive functions
• guard means duplicating p into a positive version p⁺ and a negative version p⁻, defined with rec and (co)-unroll respectively (see above), and everywhere p t1...tn is used we use, say, p⁺ t1...tn with a guard p⁺ t1...tn = p⁻ t1...tn.