Is there an software package aimed at verfication of simple equational proofs? 


I am hoping to avoid the usual overhead involved with First Order Logic or Higher Order Logic verification systems.


[Apologies for the 'software question', but formal verification usually involves this. :) References to papers that might point me in the right direction would of course be appreciated.]



Formal verification of simple equational proofs (as in Universal Algebra...)?
SMT (Satisfaction Modulo Theories) solving is pretty much the go-to technology for this these days, and works shockingly well in practice, often even on undecidable theories. Here are links to a few such projects (though there are many, many more implementations). 


* CVC3: <http://cs.nyu.edu/acsys/cvc3/>
* OpenSMT: <http://verify.inf.unisi.ch/opensmt>
* Z3: <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/z3/>
* STP: <http://sites.google.com/site/stpfastprover/>


The SMT-LIB webpage[1] is a central library organizing the efforts of many of these efforts as well as containing a specification of a common language for SMT solvers to take as input.


[1] <http://combination.cs.uiowa.edu/smtlib/>


