How to do cases with an inductive type in Coq

Question

I wan to use the destruct tactic to prove a statement by cases. I have read a couple of examples online and I\'m confused. Could someone explain it better?

Answer 1

How to discard impossible cases? Well, it's true that the first two obligations are impossible to prove, but note they have contradicting assumptions (zero <> zero and one <> one, respectively). So you will be able to prove those goals with tauto (there are also more primitive tactics that will do the trick, if you are interested).

inversion is a more advanced version of destruct. Additional to 'destructing' the inductive, it will sometimes generate some equalities (that you may need). It itself is a simple version of induction, which will additionally generate an induction hypothesis for you.

If you have several inductive types in your goal, you can destruct/invert them one by one.

More detailed walk-through:

Inductive three := zero | one | two .

Lemma test : forall a, a <> zero /\ a <> one -> a = two.
Proof.
  intros a H.
  destruct H. (* to get two parts of conjunction *)
  destruct a. (* case analysis on 'a' *)
(* low-level proof *)
  compute in H. (* to see through the '<>' notation *)
  elimtype False. (* meaning: assumptions are contradictory, I can prove False from them *)
  apply H.
  reflexivity.
(* can as well be handled with more high-level tactics *)
  firstorder.
(* the "proper" case *)
  reflexivity.
Qed.