Strategies and Analysis Techniques in Functional Program Optimization

of the Ph.D. Dissertation Computer systems play an important role in the modern information society. However, the low quality of software and its low level of abstraction, inhibit the necessary confidence of final users and system developers. Correctness of computer programs by a mathematical theory of computation is the fundamental concern of the theory of programming and of its application in large-scale software engineering [13,17,18]. Formal methods provide software engineering with the suitable scientific and technological framework to become a real engineering, as predictable as civil or electrical engineering are [11,12,13]. Indeed, the use of declarative rule-based programming languages during all * Work partially supported by MCyT under grants TIC2001-2705-C03-01, HA2001-0059, and HU2001-0019