Report on BCTCS 2005

This report contains edited abstracts from BCTCS 2005, which was held on 22nd to 24th March 2005 in Nottingham, England.

Accurate Step Counting

Starting with an evaluator for a language, an abstract machine for the same language can be mechanically derived using successive program transformations. This has relevance to studying both the space and time properties of programs because these can be estimated by counting transitions of the abstract machine and measuring the size of the additional data structures needed, such as environments and stacks. In this article we use this process to derive a function that accurately counts the number of steps required to evaluate expressions in a simple language.