Semantic Cut Elimination for the Logic of Bunched Implications, Formalized in Coq

Abstract: The logic of bunched implications (BI) is a substructural logic that forms the backbone of separation logic, the much studied logic for reasoning about heap-manipulating programs. Although the proof theory and metatheory of BI are mathematically involved, the formalization of important metatheoretical results is still incipient. In this paper we present a self-contained formalized, in the Coq proof assistant, proof of a central metatheoretical property of BI: cut elimination for its sequent calculus. The presented proof is semantic, in the sense that is obtained by interpreting sequents in a particular "universal" model. This results in a more modular and elegant proof than a standard Gentzen-style cut elimination argument, which can be subtle and error-prone in manual proofs for BI. In particular, our semantic approach avoids unnecessary inversions on proof derivations, or the uses of cut reductions and the multi-cut rule. Besides modular, our approach is also robust: we demonstrate how our method scales, with minor modifications, to (i) an extension of BI with an arbitrary set of \emph{simple structural rules}, and (ii) an extension with an S4-like $\Box$ modality.