Expression Refinement

This thesis presents a refinement calculus for expressions. The aim of refinement calculi is to make programming a mathematical activity, and thereby improve the correctness of programs. To achieve this, a refinement calculus provides a formal language and a set of rules that allow transformations of the language terms. Using a refinement calculus, to produce a correct program, the programmer writes a possibly non-algorithmic or inefficient term that nevertheless obviously describes the intended program. This term is the specification, and it is transformed into an efficient program by syntactic transformation, using the rules of the refinement calculus. This transformation is refinement