This is great and could provide additional guardrails on top of large language models. I imagine we could provide a more rigorous approach to prove that a LLM can behave in certain ways within a workflow.
Isn't it a fundamental limitation of LLMs that we can't?
F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#32I wonder if it's a good idea to pick a name that's hard to search for...
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#33I studied formal languages for ~2 years and have professional experience programming coq. The real benefit of this language, over other formal languages is the focus on being able to write real programs in it. Most theorem proving languages are focused on mathematics or proving things about a program, and they are very abstract. This language appears to have a goal of bridging the gap and making it simple to write pr…
Where would a smooth brained CRUD app web developer who failed high school maths perhaps learn more about the point of this?
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://dafny.org/ also allows proof checking and allows do write real programs with it. It has a java like syntax and is also from MS I believe
Having used both Dafny and F* quite extensively, Dafny, and its predecessor Spec#, are simple and practical, thanks to being based on Hoare logic (contracts). It's a great place to start with verification, as proofs are discharged to SAT/SMT, so things are automated. It can get a bit frustrating when automation is not able to prove things, that's the major disadvantage of SAT/SMT. But it's not a toy. Some of the larg…
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#35I studied formal languages for ~2 years and have professional experience programming coq. The real benefit of this language, over other formal languages is the focus on being able to write real programs in it. Most theorem proving languages are focused on mathematics or proving things about a program, and they are very abstract. This language appears to have a goal of bridging the gap and making it simple to write pr…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
It builds on the Why3 platform which also supports Frama-C for the C language. IIRC, SPARK can be compiled to C for C-only, runtime targets as well.
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#36In what situations would one prefer this vs Lean? This seems to compile to native code if desired, so does that mean it’s faster than Lean? Forgive me if these are obvious questions, I’m just curious and on my phone right now away from my machine.
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#37Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#38This is great and could provide additional guardrails on top of large language models. I imagine we could provide a more rigorous approach to prove that a LLM can behave in certain ways within a workflow.
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://dafny.org/ also allows proof checking and allows do write real programs with it. It has a java like syntax and is also from MS I believe
Having used both Dafny and F* quite extensively, Dafny, and its predecessor Spec#, are simple and practical, thanks to being based on Hoare logic (contracts). It's a great place to start with verification, as proofs are discharged to SAT/SMT, so things are automated. It can get a bit frustrating when automation is not able to prove things, that's the major disadvantage of SAT/SMT. But it's not a toy. Some of the larg…
Re: F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language
#40I wonder if it's a good idea to pick a name that's hard to search for...
Is it really that much harder to search for than "C", "C++", "C#", "F#", "Go", "Rust", "D"...? Googling "Fstar programming language" works fine for me.