Isabelle REPL

Unofficial support for Isabelle's Read-Eval-Print-Loop.

Features

• Python Client, easy for Machine Learning.
• Full support for all Isabelle commands
• Tracing the proof state and the output panel for each step of evaluation.
  • Plugin: collecting data from Isabelle's internal representations by plugins written in Isabelle/ML (example).
• Socket based remote communication
• Socket based Concurrency
• State rollback (example)
• Parsing terms & Retrival of lemmas (example)
• Sledgehammer (example)
• Retrivial of contextual information including assumptions, local facts, fixed terms, fixed types, and goals, in either the pretty-printed form or S expression (example).
• Convertion between Isabelle's ASCII and Unicode (example)

Installation

We only support Isabelle2024. Since Isabelle2025 is going to release, the support for Isabelle2023 will not be updated any more.

Ensuring <ISABELLE-BASE-DIRECTORY>/bin is in your $PATH environment

git clone https://github.com/xqyww123/Isa-REPL.git
cd Isa-REPL
git checkout $(isabelle version) # Error can raise if you are using an unsupported version of Isabelle
isabelle components -u .
pip install IsaREPL

Start up the REPL server

# merely an example:
./repl_server.sh 127.0.0.1:6666 HOL ./tmp -o threads=16
# Note, you must explicitly indicate the number of cpu cores that you want to use,
# otherwise, Isabelle only takes 8 core by default

Run ./repl_server.sh to see the full explanation of the arguments and options.

Example Clients

Every interface of our client is will documented (it is highly recommended to read our source). Some examples are given in the example folder.

# Run an example
./examples/example_eval.py 127.0.0.1:6666

To evaluate a whole theory file

./examples/eval_file.py 127.0.0.1:6666 $(isabelle getenv -b ISABELLE_HOME)/src/HOL/List.thy

Notes

Known Issues

The REPL server (or the Isabelle system) becomes unstable when the number of parallel threads exceeds 100. We suggest to launch multiple servers if your machine has more than 64 cpu cores, and give every server at most 64 cores by setting option -o threads=64

Documents

All documents are given as docstrings attaching to Python client interfaces, see the source.

Concurrency

This REPL supports concurrent evaluation of multiple files. However, to ensure proper error tracking and result tracing, it disables Isabelle's concurrency between commands within a single theory file. While Isabelle typically executes by commands asynchronously (continuing to the next command before completion), this REPL enforces synchronous evaluation. Each command must complete before the next begins, allowing for accurate capture and reporting of any failures.

Sledgehammer (via our auto_sledgehamemr wrapper, see example) is still concurrent.

Communication Protocol

It is possible to implement a client in other languages. However, the document for the communication protocol is not provided and I refer you to read our source code, as it should be simple enough.

Contribution

Feel free to open any GitHub issue if you have any feature requests.

I am not a professional python developer, so contribution is highly welcome to enrich the client's features.