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From: wlrush@water.waterloo.edu (Wenchantress Wench Wendall)
Newsgroups: ont.events,uw.talks,uw.cs.grad
Subject: MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION
Keywords: Mr. Alfredo Viola, graduate student, Dept. of Comp. Sci.
Message-ID: <2838@water.waterloo.edu>
Date: 13 Dec 89 19:33:12 GMT
Distribution: ont
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 44


DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION

                    -Monday, December 18, 1989

Mr.  Alfredo  Viola,  graduate  student, Dept. of Comp.
Sci.,  will  speak on ``Design and Implementation of an
Algebra of Data Structures.''

TIME:                 3:30 p.m.

ROOM:                 DC 1331

ABSTRACT

"At  most  points  in a program one in concerned solely
with   the   behavioural   characteristics  of  a  data
structure.  One  is  interested in what one can do with
it,  not  in  how  the  various  operations  on  it are
implemented" (J.V.  Guttag, 1977).

We  define  the algebra by presenting the Abstract Data
Types which specify the data structures we consider. We
will  present  a  hierarchy  in which the relationships
among the Abstract Data Types are explicitly expressed.

We  implement  this  algebra  using  the system package
Gauss developed by Michael B. Monagan at the University
of  Waterloo using the Maple programming language. This
package defines a hierarchy of algebraic structures. It
has system primitives which allow the implementation of
abstract  data types exploiting the notions of category
and multiple inheritance.

The result is a very compact implementation in which we
have  achieved  a  high degree of abstraction where the
algebraic   properties   of  the  data  structures  are
presented explicitly.

                   December 13, 1989