HOL-Library: supplemental theories for main Isabelle/HOL

Addition of new theories should be done with some care, as the ``module system'' of Isabelle is rather simplistic. The following guidelines may be helpful to achieve maximum re-usability and minimum clashes with existing developments.

Examples

Theories should be as ``generic'' as is sensible. Unused (or rather unusable?) theories should be avoided; common applications should actually refer to the present theory. Small example uses may be included in the library as well, but should be put in a separate theory, such as Foobar accompanied by Foobar_Examples.

Theory names

The theory loader name space is flat, so use sufficiently long and descriptive names to reduce the danger of clashes with the user's own theories. The convention for theory names is as follows: Foobar_Doobar (this looks best in LaTeX output).

Names of logical items

There are separate hierarchically structured name spaces for types, constants, theorems etc. Nevertheless, some care should be taken, as the name spaces are always ``open''. Use adequate names; avoid unreadable abbreviations. The general naming convention is to separate word constituents by underscores, as in foo_bar or Foo_Bar (this looks best in LaTeX output).

Global context declarations

Only items introduced in the present theory should be declared globally (e.g. as Simplifier rules). Note that adding and deleting rules from parent theories may result in strange behavior later, depending on the user's arrangement of import lists.

Spacing

Isabelle is able to produce a high-quality LaTeX document from the theory sources, provided some minor issues are taken care of. In particular, spacing and line breaks are directly taken from source text. Incidentally, output looks very good if common type-setting conventions are observed: put a single space after each punctuation character (",", ".", etc.), but none before it; do not extra spaces inside of parentheses; do not attempt to simulate table markup with spaces, avoid ``hanging'' indentations.