Abstract

Abstract. Reynolds, Ishtiaq and O’Hearn have recently developed an approach to reasoning about mutable data structures using an assertion language with spatial conjunction and implication connectives. In this paper we study computability and complexity properties of a subset of the language, which allows statements about the shape of pointer structures (such as “there is a link from x to y”) to be made, but not statements about the data held in cells (such as “x is a prime number”). We show that validity, even for this restricted language, is not r.e., but that the quantifier-free sublanguage is decidable. We then consider the complexity of model checking and validity for several fragments. 1

Citations