VALID : tactic -> tactic

SYNOPSIS
Tries to ensure that a tactic is valid.

DESCRIPTION
For any tactic t, the application VALID t gives a new tactic that does exactly the same as t except that it also checks validity of the tactic and will fail if it is violated. Validity means that the subgoals produced by t can, if proved, be used by the justification function given by t to construct a theorem corresponding to the original goal. This check is performed by actually creating, using mk_fthm, theorems corresponding to the subgoals, and seeing if the result of applying the justification function to them gives a theorem corresponding to the original goal. If it does, then VALID t simply applies t, and if not it fails. In principle, the extra dummy hypothesis used by mk_fthm (necessary to ensure logical soundness) could interfere with the mechanism of the tactic, but this never seems to happen.

COMMENTS
You can always force validity checking whenever it is applied by using VALID on a tactic. But if the goal is initially proved by using the subgoal stack this is probably not necessary since VALID is already implicitly applied in the e (expand) function.

SEE ALSO
CHANGED_TAC, e, mk_fthm, TRY.