Data Refinement

Abstract

It is not our intention that this book should be about algorithms, but merely the correctness concerns associated with algorithms and how they may be addressed hand-in-hand with the construction/derivation/generation of implementations. Another topic that comes into play when addressing more complex problems (apart from the characterization and measurement of complexity) is that of Data Structures. So far we have taken the stance that any data type (structure?) that is used within a problem specification is also available in PDL. This may not be so and hence, if we wish to model the problem structure directly in the solution, we may have to provide a bespoke implementation of an ‘abstract’ type within our implementation/program. In general terms, this chapter considers the replacement, the refinement of data structures

This is not the common notion of data refinement, but the underlying concepts are very similar