ABC is an equivalence checker for the pi-calculus. You can find more technical explanations in the User's Guide of ABC: abc_ug.ps.
ABC is a tool written in the programming language OCaml.
OCaml is a functionnal programming language based on the ML paradygm and developped at INRIA Rocquencourt in France near Paris. You can find more informations about OCaml on its web page located at http://caml.inria.fr.
To compile ABC, you need to install OCaml and at least version 3.06. Distributions for Windows/Cygwin, MacOS-X and Linux can be found on the OCaml web site.
In the following, we assume that you have a Unix-like system. The installation procedure has been tested under Linux RedHat 8.0, Linux Mandrake 9.x and Windows XP (with Cygwin).
We assume moreover that you have put the content of the archive in the directory /usr/local/abc (this can be any other directory of your choice but in the following, we give commands assuming you have chosen /usr/local/abc).
cd /usr/local/abc
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to build OCaml bytecode and the file 'abc' ocamlbuild main.byte
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to build native code (if available) and the file 'abc.opt' ocamlbuild main.native
Of course, if native code is available under your platform, we strongly advise you to build native code.
Depending on which target you have decided to build the ABC, type '/usr/local/abc/main.byte' or '/usr/local/abc/main.native' to launch the ABC. More detailed explanations can be found in the User's Guide. Examples can be found in the subdirectory examples.
You will notice quickly that the toplevel of ABC is not really user-friendly. To enhance the ABC, we strongly advise you to install 'ledit' which is a tool made by Daniel de Rauglaudre that gives any program a true line editor ร la emacs. You can make a little shell script that launch abc with ledit:
#!/bin/sh ledit /usr/local/abc/abc
assuming that ledit is in your path.
You may also use rlwrap instead of ledit.
The license is contained in the file LICENSE.
Feel free to contact the author at [email protected] if you have any problems using ABC or if you have any suggestions.
Linux Mandrake web site: http://www.mandrakelinux.com/ Linux RedHat web site : http://www.redhat.com/ Cygwin web site : http://www.cygwin.com/ OCaml web site : http://caml.inria.fr/ Ledit : http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/