Using induction starting from 1 in Coq

Question

I am trying to use induction starting from 1 in a Coq proof. From this question I got a proof of the induction principle I need:

Section induction_at_1.
  Variable P : nat -> Prop.
  Hypothesis p1 : P 1.
  Hypothesis pS : forall n, P n -> P (S n).

  Theorem induction_at_1:
    forall n, n > 0 -> P n.

    induction n; intro.
    - exfalso; omega.
    - destruct n.
      + apply p1.
      + assert (S n >= 1) by omega.
        intuition.
  Qed.
End induction_at_1.

What I get looks structurally very similar to standard induction. In fact, Check nat_ind yields

nat_ind:
  forall P : nat -> Prop,
  P 0 ->
  (forall n : nat, P n -> P (S n)) ->
  forall n : nat, P n

while Check induction_at_1 yields

induction_at_1:
  forall P : nat -> Prop,
  P 1 ->
  (forall n : nat, P n -> P (S n)) ->
  forall n : nat, n > 0 -> P n

The issue arises when I try to apply this induction principle. For instance, I would like to prove by induction

Lemma cancellation:
  forall a b c: nat, a > 0 -> a * b = a * c -> b = c.

This seems exactly suited to the kind of induction I have above, but when I start my proof like this

  intros a b c H0 H1.
  induction a using induction_at_1.

I get the following error, which I cannot interpret:

Not the right number of induction arguments (expected 2 arguments).

Since the two induction principles look almost identical to me, I am not sure why this does not work. Any ideas?

Arthur Azevedo De Amorim Arthur Azevedo De Amorim · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-19T03:55:57

I also find this behavior puzzling, but there are a few ways around it. One is to use the ssreflect induction tactic, called elim:

From Coq Require Import ssreflect.

Lemma cancellation:
  forall a b c: nat, a > 0 -> a * b = a * c -> b = c.
Proof.
intros a b c H.
elim/induction_at_1: a / H.
(* ... *)
Abort.

The second line is telling Coq to perform induction on H (not a) while generalizing a and using the induction principle induction_at_1. I couldn't get something similar to work using the regular Coq induction.

An alternative is to use plain natural number induction. In this case, I believe that the lemma follows by induction on b while generalizing c (I am not sure that induction on a works). If you do need to show something of the form m <= n -> P n for all n, you can replace n by n - m + m (which should be possible with the m <= n hypothesis), and then prove P (n - m + m) by induction on n - m.

Using induction starting from 1 in Coq

1 Answers