The Isabelle System Distribution

Version information

This is Isabelle-94 revision 8 as of May 1997. Basically, it should be backwards compatible to earlier Isabelle-94 releases. Older versions (like Isabelle-93) are quite different, though. See also the NEWS file in the distribution for a more detailed list of new features and changes.

System requirements

Isabelle requires a real Unix box with sufficient resources. Fun starts at about 32MB of memory (somewhat depending on your ML system), several tens of MB disk space and with a relatively fast CPU.

Furthermore, it needs the following software, which is not part of the distribution:

The ML system and GNU bash are absolutely essential. Perl is optional for core functionality, but still highly recommended.

The following ML system and platform combinations are known to work quite well:

Poly/ML is a commercial product and costs money, but it is stable and efficient. It requires relatively little memory (starting at about 16MB) and disk space (about 40MB for all distributed object logics).

SML/NJ needs lots of store and disk space, but it is free. The last official release is 0.93. Recent working versions may be better suited, under normal circumstances. Beware of the many incompatibilities among SML/NJ versions! From the 1.09.x family, we now only support 1.09.27, or later. An unofficial pre-built binary distribution of at least SML/NJ 1.09.27 for Linux is also available. If you have to re-build SML/NJ 1.09.x yourself from the sources, just comment out all targets except "sml" (cf. the installation instructions of the SML/NJ distribution).

Installation

See file INSTALL in the Isabelle sources on how to build the system. Further background information may be found in the Isabelle System Manual, distributed as dvi with the sources.

Interfaces

The distribution includes only a very primitive interface based on ordinary terminal sessions.

David Aspinall has written a more elaborate user interface for Isabelle. It runs under recent versions of GNU Emacs and XEmacs, the latter being recommended. It's useful to both novices and experts.

Other sources of information

Mailing list

The electronic mailing list isabelle-users@cl.cam.ac.uk provides a forum for Isabelle users to discuss problems and exchange information. To join, send a message to isabelle-users-request@cl.cam.ac.uk.

Personal mail

Lawrence C Paulson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
Pembroke Street
Cambridge CB2 3QG
England

E-mail: lcp@cl.cam.ac.uk
Phone: +44-223-334600
Fax: +44-223-334748

or

Tobias Nipkow
Institut fuer Informatik
T. U. Muenchen
D-80290 Muenchen
Germany

E-mail: nipkow@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
Phone: +49-89-289-22690
Fax: +49-89-289-28183

Please report any problems you encounter. While we shall try to be helpful, we can accept no responsibility for the deficiences of Isabelle and their consequences.