Pointerfest is a two-day series of talks on the logic and semantics of programs that manipulate pointers. It focusses on recent developments, where a notion of heap partitioning is used to enable modular, or local, reasoning about portions of computer memory. This includes the separation logic of Reynolds, O'Hearn and colleagues and the theory of abstraction for a subset of Java by Banerjee and Naumann. The intention is that this will be a research meeting, with a relaxed schedule and plenty of time for interaction. Presentations are scheduled for one hour, but speakers will be expected to talk for 30-40 minutes, leaving the remainder for discussion.
There will be two days, one on abstraction and the other on separation logic. Anyone is welcome to attend, but there will be no expository talks; this is ``for experts''. The presentations will be on current problems and ideas. See below for the kind of background material we will assume for the workshop.
We will be providing lunch on Friday 16 Aug. To help us guage numbers and to book your place, if you plan to attend on the Friday it would be helpful if you could send an e-mail to ohearn@dcs.qmul.ac.uk with subject line "PointerFest Attend". If you are vegetarian please say. There is no fee for the workshop.
Thursday 15 Aug (Abstraction Day)
Friday 16 Aug (Separation Logic Day)
Abstraction day concentrates on issues of confinement and information hiding in the presence of the heap. A typical background for this day would include the following papers.
Background for Separation Logic day may be found in John Reynolds's LICS'02 paper, which summarizes developments in the logic up to May of 2002.