We discuss the evolutionary path from the Edinburgh Pure Lisp Theorem Prover of the early 1970s to its modern counterpart, A C omputational L ogic for A pplicative C ommon L isp, aka ACL2, which is in regular industrial use. Among the milestones in this evolution are the adoption of a first-order subset of a programming language as a logic; the analysis of recursive definitions to guess appropriate mathematical induction schemes; the use of simplification in inductive proofs; the incorporation of rewrite rules derived from user-suggested lemmas; the generalization of that idea to allow the user to affect other proof techniques soundly; the recognition that evaluation efficiency is paramount so that formal models can serve as prototypes and the logic can be used to reprogram the system; use of the system to prove extensions correct; the incorporation of decision procedures; the provision of hierarchically structured libraries of previously certified results to configure the prover; the provision of system programming features to allow verification tools to be built and verified within the system; the release of many verified collections of lemmas supporting floating point, programming languages, and hardware platforms; a verified “bit-bashing” tool exploiting verified BDD and checked external SAT procedures; and the provision of certain higher-order features within the first-order setting. As will become apparent, some of these milestones were suggested or even prototyped by users. Some additional non-technical aspects of the project are also critical. Among these are a devotion to soundness, good documentation, freely available source code, production of a system usable by industry, responsiveness to user needs, and a dedicated, passionate, and brilliant user community.

中文翻译：

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从 Pure Lisp 定理证明器到 ACL2 的里程碑

我们讨论从 1970 年代初的爱丁堡纯 Lisp 定理证明器到现代对应物的进化路径，一种 C计算的大号逻辑一种申请的C常见的大号isp，又名 ACL2，用于常规工业用途。这一演变的里程碑之一是采用编程语言的一阶子集作为逻辑；递归定义分析以猜测适当的数学归纳方案；在归纳证明中使用简化；从用户建议的引理中引入重写规则；推广该想法以允许用户有效地影响其他证明技术；认识到评估效率是最重要的，因此形式模型可以用作原型，并且逻辑可以用于重新编程系统；使用系统来证明扩展是正确的；纳入决策程序；提供先前认证结果的分层结构库以配置证明者；提供系统编程功能以允许在系统内构建和验证验证工具；发布了许多支持浮点、编程语言和硬件平台的经过验证的引理集合；一个经过验证的“bit-bashing”工具，利用经过验证的 BDD 和经过检查的外部 SAT 程序；以及在一阶设置中提供某些高阶特征。显而易见，其中一些里程碑是由用户提出的，甚至是由用户设计的。该项目的一些其他非技术方面也很关键。其中包括对健全性的奉献、良好的文档、免费提供的源代码、工业可用系统的生产、对用户需求的响应以及专注、热情和出色的用户社区。