Preface: Volume 59, Issue 3

Abstract

QAPL'01This volume contains the Post-Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages (QAPL'01). The workshop was held in Firenze, Italy on Friday 7th September 2001, as satellite event to Principles, Logics, and Implementations of high-level programming languages, PLI'01.The majority of approaches in program semantics and analysis are arguably concentrated on qualitative investigations of various computational properties. As a result, some aspects of computation are neglected, which are of a quantitative nature. Such aspects are nevertheless important and sometimes essential in determining the behaviour of systems. As an example, issues related to resource consumption (storage, time, bandwidth, etc.) cannot be ignored when systems of interacting, competing or cooperating processes are considered.The aim of this workshop was to discuss appropriate models of programming languages, which are able to capture quantitative aspects of computation. Such models are good candidates to provide the base of new approaches in semantics and program analysis. Their investigation will hopefully not just allow for a better understanding of program behaviour (e.g. how agents compete for a limited resource), but also help to establish better connections with related complexity theoretic questions.Probabilistic languages and real-time languages constitute two important prototypical examples of quantitative models. But we encouraged the contributions covering other and/or more general quantitative aspects in the design, analysis and implementation of programming languages, with particular emphasis on the functional and declarative paradigms.The papers presented at the workshop were selected by the program committee consisting of •Luca de Alfaro, University of California at Berkeley, USA•Frank de Boer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands•Alessandra Di Pierro, University of Pisa, Italy•Maurizio Gabbrielli, University of Udine, Italy•Marta Z. Kwiatkowska, University of Birmingham, UK•Herbert Wiklicky, Imperial College, UK.At the workshop there was one invited talk by •David Sands: Asymptotic Reasoning Meets Programming Language Semanticsas well as eight contributed talks: •Keye Martin: Powerdomains and Zero Finding•Thom Frühwirth: As Time Goes By: Complexity Analysis of Simplification Rule•Antonio Brogi, Alessandra Di Pierro and Herbert Wiklicky: On Language Expressiveness and Dimension•David Clark, Sebastian Hunt and Pasquale Malacaria: Quantitative Analysis of the Leakage of Confidential Data•Marius C. Bujorianu and Manuela L. Bujorianu: On the Hilbert Machine Quantitative Computational Model•Frank S. de Boer, Maurizio Gabbrielli and Maria Chiara Meo: Proving Correctness of Timed Concurrent Constraint Programs•Nicos Angelopoulos and David R. Gilbert: A Statistical View of Probabilistic Finite Domains•Richard Kieburtz: Real-time Reactive Programming for Embedded ControllersThese Post-Proceedings contain the reviewed and revised versions of the first four of these presentations.October 2002 Alessandra di Pierro Herbert Wiklicky