Systems and
Formalisms Lab

Teaching

Our lab is responsible for two courses:

CS-214 — Software Construction (200-level, 8 credits)

Learn how to design and implement reliable, maintainable, and efficient software using a mix of programming skills (declarative style, higher-order functions, inductive types, parallelism) and fundamental software construction concepts (reusability, abstraction, encapsulation, composition, proofs). Jointly taught by Clément Pit-Claudel, Martin Odersky, and Viktor Kunčak.

Syllabus

  • Functional programming paradigm

  • Recursion and tail-recursion

  • Evaluation strategies, lazy evaluation, substitution model

  • Modularity, data abstraction, representation independence

  • Subtyping, inheritance, type classes

  • Polymorphism, variance

  • Structural induction

  • Stateless parallelism, map-reduce, associative operations

  • Effects: state, exceptions

  • Documentation, tests, specification

  • Interpreters and program semantics

  • Program transformation and program correctness

Course website

EPFL coursebook entry

CS-428 — Interactive Theorem Proving (Graduate-level, 6 credits)

A hands-on introduction to interactive theorem proving, proofs as programs, dependent types, and to the Coq proof assistant. Jointly taught by Clément Pit-Claudel and Aurèle Barrière.

Syllabus

  • Intro to the Coq proof assistant (logic, higher-order functions, tactics)

  • Functional programming (inductive types and fixpoints)

  • Structural induction (data structures and verified algorithms)

  • Interpreter-based program semantics (intro to compiler verification)

  • Inductive relations (predicates, rule induction)

  • Automation and tactics I (bottom-up reasoning and logic programming)

  • Operational program semantics (small- and big-step semantics)

  • Program logics (hoare triples)

  • Automation and tactics II (top-down reasoning)

  • Type systems (Simply-typed lambda calculus)

  • Dependent types and equality proofs

  • Automation and tactics III (proofs by reflection)

  • Real-world interactive theorem proving (guest lecture)

EPFL coursebook entry