Refinement of Classical Proofs for Program Extraction

The A-Translation enables us to unravel the computational information in classical proofs, by first transforming them into constructive ones, however at the cost of introducing redundancies in the extracted code. This is due to the fact that all negations inserted during translation are replaced by the computationally relevant form of the goal. In this thesis we are concerned with eliminating such redundancies, in order to obtain better extracted programs. For this, we propose two methods: a controlled and minimal insertion of negations, such that a refinement of the A-Translation can be used and an algorithmic decoration of the proofs, in order to mark the computationally irrelevant components. By restricting the logic to be minimal, the Double Negation Translation is no longer necessary. On this fragment of minimal logic we apply the refined A-Translation, as proposed in (Berget et al., 2002). This method identifies further selected classes of formulas for which the negations do not need to be substituted by computationally relevant formulas. However, the refinement imposes restrictions which considerably narrow the applicability domain of the A-Translation. We address this issue by proposing a controlled insertion of double negations, with the benefit that some intuitionistically valid \Pi^0_2-formulas become provable in minimal logic and that certain formulas are transformed to match the requirements of the refined A-Translation. We present the outcome of applying the refined A-translation to a series of examples. Their purpose is two folded. On one hand, they serve as case studies for the role played by negations, by shedding a light on the restrictions imposed by the translation method. On the other hand, the extracted programs are characterized by a specific behaviour: they adhere to the continuation passing style and the recursion is in general in tail form. The second improvement concerns the detection of the computationally irrelevant subformulas, such that no terms are extracted from them. In order to achieve this, we assign decorations to the implication and universal quantifier. The algorithm that we propose is shown to be optimal, correct and terminating and is applied on the examples of factorial and list reversal.