PURRS：Towards-Computer-Algebra-Support-for-Fully-Automatic-Worst-Case-Complexity-Analysis.pdfVIP

PURRS: Towards Computer Algebra Support for Fully Automatic Worst-Case Complexity Analysis⋆ Roberto Bagnara, Andrea Pescetti, Alessandro Zaccagnini, and Enea Zaffanella Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy {bagnara,pescetti,zaffanella}@cs.unipr.it, zaccagni@math.unipr.it Abstract. Fully automatic worstcase complexity analysis has a number of applications in computerassisted program manipulation. A classical and powerful approach to complexity analysis consists in formally de riving, from the program syntax, a set of constraints expressing bounds on the resources required by the program, which are then solved, pos sibly applying safe approximations. In several interesting cases, these constraints take the form of recurrence relations. While techniques for solving recurrences are known and implemented in several computer al gebra systems, these do not completely fulfill the needs of fully automatic complexity analysis: they only deal with a somewhat restricted class of recurrence relations, or sometimes require user intervention, or they are restricted to the computation of exact solutions that are often so complex to be unmanageable, and thus useless in practice. In this paper we briefly describe PURRS, a system and software library aimed at providing all the computer algebra services needed by applications performing or exploit ing the results of worstcase complexity analyses. The capabilities of the system are illustrated by means of examples derived from the analysis of programs written in a domainspecific functional programming language for realtime embedded systems. Key words: Complexity analysis, recurrences, approximation. 1 Introduction Complexity analysis aims at the derivation of bounds to the complexity