Benjamin C. Pierce, Peter Sewell, Stephanie Weirich, Steve Zdancewic. It Is Time to Mechanize Programming Language Metatheory. In Bertrand Meyer, Jim Woodcock, editors, Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments, First IFIP TC 2/WG 2.3 Conference, VSTTE 2005, Zurich, Switzerland, October 10-13, 2005, Revised Selected Papers and Discussions. Volume 4171 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 26-30, Springer, 2005. [doi]
How close are we to a world in which mechanically verified software is commonplace? A world in which theorem proving technology is used routinely by both software developers and programming language researchers alike? One crucial step towards achieving these goals is mechanized reasoning about language metatheory. The time has come to bring together the theorem proving and programming language communities to address this problem. We have proposed the POPLMark challenge as a concrete set of benchmarks intended both for measuring progress in this area and for stimulating discussion and collaboration. Our goal is to push the boundaries of existing technology to the point where we can achieve mechanized metatheory for the masses.