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Litex: Formal math for everyone – set theory examples with Lean comparison

litexlang.com

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Re: Litex: Formal math for everyone – set theory examples with Lean comparison

#11
post #7

Something that always bugged me about Lean is how unreadable and unwritable. Math uses extremely heavy notation to make statements concise. It's hard to learn the notation without a visual reference guide, sync the symbols don't have guessable names, but once you know what the symbols mean, it's readable. Java is incredibly verbose but you can make out what it's saying word by word Lean is line noise. It's like assem…

Do you have an example Lean statement you struggle with? I would have posed that they're "just" using standard math notation that should be explained in the relevant textbook for the math you're trying to formalize, but perhaps they are indeed cooking...

Re: Litex: Formal math for everyone – set theory examples with Lean comparison

#12
post #8

One thing I never understood about this: why does this not just compile to Lean so they're compatible with each other? Having a good interface is admirable, but the difference between set and type based foundations seems not very important and porting any enough math to sustain Litex seems like a huge undertaking.

It's truely great if Litex does compile to existing formal languages. The only problem is that we can not find a good way to compile our verification process, which does not require users to give names to facts they are using and thus very different from how Lean works, to Lean (set theory example is just the first one of a series of comparisons). Besides, it's even harder to compile future functionaliteies, like pri…

To be honest I'm not convinced by the technical downsides you mentioned here BUT I can see why you wouldn't want to spend time on this if it takes away from language development. Thanks!
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