leanprover / leanprover/reference-manual
kinds of metavariables
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Description
What question should the reference manual answer?
What kind of metavariables are there (synthetic opaque, etc.)? What are their precise descriptions and differences? How do the different versions come into existence? Maybe in scope: what tactics/meta-definitions are able to assign which metavariables (or in what way do they handle the different kinds of metavariables differently)?
Additional context
This Zulip post states "isDefEq does not assign synthetic opaque metavariables". It would be nice if after reading this section I could (1) learn what this precisely means and ideally (2) allow me to predict whether another meta-def would or would not make such assignments.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading the existing reference manual coverage of metavariables and the linked Zulip discussion about MVarId.assign versus IsDefEq. Map the kinds of metavariables, their precise differences and creation paths, then document how tactics and meta-definitions handle assignments. Done means the manual answers the stated questions and makes assignment behavior predictable.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Domain
- documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100