The Coq mailing list

[Kevin Sullivan <sullivan.kevinj AT gmail.com>]

How about Cert? Same in English and French. Dead certain; a certainty. Positive (if not positivist) connotations. Communicates purpose. A manifesto. Use is precedented in the community, as in CompCert. Not "taken" as the name of a prominent formal language, AFAICT. Sounds good. Anyway, I already said more than a veritable outsider should. Kind regards to all, --Kevin

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 9:10 PM Cyrus Omar <comar AT umich.edu> wrote:

For you, Adam, I think it would be especially appropriate to say "I write Ltac programs" instead, then. :-)

Yes, this would require changing how we speak, in a manner that I think is quite consistent with our community's values: many of us quite value being clear about the distinction between a language and the implementations thereof, even in situations where there is one primary implementation (e.g. Haskell folks tend to be quite good at understanding the difference between Haskell and GHC, and of course the Standard ML community has taken this well to heart.)

Cyrus

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 9:01 PM Adam Chlipala <adamc AT csail.mit.edu> wrote:

That doesn't sound right without terminology changes, at least not for
the way I'm used to using Coq.  It's common that more time is spent
writing in the tactic language Ltac than in Gallina.

On 4/6/21 8:58 PM, Cyrus Omar wrote:
> The first sentence on the About Coq page [1] says "Coq implements a
> program specification and mathematical higher-level language called
> Gallina".
>
> If that is accurate, then I think Gallina seems to be the appropriate
> name to use in conversation as a user of the language, in the same way
> that one says "I write C programs" even if what they are doing
> day-to-day is interacting with GCC, Clang, or CompCert via a
> collection of other utilities, e.g. editors, language servers, and the
> like.
>
> The objection that Gallina is one of several languages associated with
> Coq is the same as the objection that in fact there is a C
> preprocessor language distinct from C the language, i.e. not salient
> in most contexts.
>
> There may still be reason to rename the Coq implementation of Gallina
> (and friends), but it would make it less urgent in that it is only in
> relatively sophisticated company, where crude innuendo is increasingly
> (though not yet universally, I concede) recognized as inappropriate,
> that one needs to mention which particular implementation of a
> language they use or work on.
>
> Cyrus