Forge: A Tool and Language for Teaching Formal Methods
Tim Nelson, Ben Greenman, Siddhartha Prasad, Tristan Dyer, Ethan Bove, Qianfan Chen, Charles Cutting, Thomas Del Vecchio, Sidney Levine, Julianne Rudner, Ben Ryjikov, Alexander Varga, Andrew Wagner, Luke West, Shriram Krishnamurthi
ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages & Applications, 2024
Abstract
This paper presents the design of Forge, a tool for teaching formal methods gradually. Forge is based on the widely-used Alloy language and analysis tool, but contains numerous improvements based on more than a decade of experience teaching Alloy to students. Although our focus has been on the classroom, many of the ideas in Forge likely also apply to training in industry.Forge offers a progression of languages that improve the learning experience by only gradually increasing in expressive power. Forge supports custom visualization of its outputs, enabling the use of widely-understood domain-specific representations. Finally, Forge provides a variety of testing features to ease the transition from programming to formal modeling. We present the motivation for and design of these aspects of Forge, and then provide a substantial evaluation based on multiple years of classroom use.
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The Forge tool is on the Web!
Paper
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