Preface

This volume contains the proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages (QAPL 2010), held in Paphos, Cyprus, on March 27-28, 2010. QAPL 2010 is a satellite event of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2010).

The workshop theme is on quantitative aspects of computation. These aspects are related to the use of physical quantities (storage space, time, bandwidth, etc.) as well as mathematical quantities (e.g. probability and measures for reliability, security and trust), and play an important (sometimes essential) role in characterising the behavior and determining the properties of systems. Such quantities are central to the definition of both the model of systems (architecture, language design, semantics) and the methodologies and tools for the analysis and verification of the systems properties. The aim of this workshop is to discuss the explicit use of quantitative information such as time and probabilities either directly in the model or as a tool for the analysis of systems.

In particular, the workshop focuses on:

• the design of probabilistic, real-time, quantum languages and the definition of semantical models for such languages;
• the discussion of methodologies for the analysis of probabilistic and timing properties (e.g. security, safety, schedulability) and of other quantifiable properties such as reliability (for hardware components), trustworthiness (in information security) and resource usage (e.g. worst-case memory/stack/cache requirements);
• the probabilistic analysis of systems which do not explicitly incorporate quantitative aspects (e.g. performance, reliability and risk analysis);
• applications to safety-critical systems, communication protocols, control systems, asynchronous hardware, and to any other domain involving quantitative issues.

The history of QAPL starts in 2001, when its first edition was held in Florence, Italy, as a satellite event of the ACM Principles, Logics, and Implementations of high-level programming languages, PLI 2001. The second edition, QAPL 2004, was held in Barcelona, Spain, as a satellite event of ETAPS. Since then, QAPL has become a yearly appointment with ETAPS. In the following years, QAPL was held in Edinburgh, Scotland (QAPL 2005), in Vienna, Austria (QAPL 2006), in Braga, Portugal (QAPL 2007), in Budapest, Hungary (QAPL 2008), and in York, UK (QAPL 2009). The proceedings of all these workshops are published as volumes in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). Two special issues of the journal of Theoretical Computer Science are dedicated to the QAPL 2004 and QAPL 2006 events, and are published in Volume 346(1) and Volume 382(1), respectively.

The Program Committee of QAPL 2010 was composed of:

• Alessandro Aldini (University of Urbino, Italy)
• Christel Baier (Technical University of Dresden, Germany)
• Marco Bernardo (University of Urbino, Italy)
• Nathalie Bertrand (INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique, France)
• Patricia Bouyer (LSV, CNRS & ENS Cachan, France)
• Jeremy Bradley (Imperial College London, UK)
• Tomas Brazdil (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
• Franck van Breugel (York University, Toronto, Canada)
• Antonio Cerone ( United Nations University - IIST, Macao)
• Kostas Chatzikokolakis (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)
• Josee Desharnais (Universite Laval, Canada)
• Alessandra Di Pierro (University of Verona, Italy)
• Susanne Graf, ( Universite Joseph Fourier / CNRS / VERIMAG, France)
• Marcus Groesser (Technical University of Dresden, Germany)
• Mieke Massink (CNR-ISTI, Italy)
• Paulo Mateus (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal)
• Annabelle McIver (Macquarie University, Australia)
• Gethin Norman (University of Glasgow, UK)
• David Parker (University of Oxford, UK)
• Jeremy Sproston (University of Torino, Italy)
• Herbert Wiklicky (Imperial College London, UK)
• Verena Wolf (Saarland University, Germany)

The programme committee selected 11 regular papers and 2 presentations. All regular papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers. The programme of the workshop included two invited talks by Jeremy Sproston (University of Torino, Italy) and Pasquale Malacaria (Queen Mary University of London), respectively.

After the workshop, the authors of regular papers were asked to submit a revised version incorporating the comments arisen during the discussion at the workshop. After a second review phase the papers were further revised and the resulting versions are now included in this volume.

We would like to thank the QAPL steering committee for its support and all the authors, the invited speakers, the programme committee and the external referees for their contribution.

June 2010

Alessandra Di Pierro and Gethin Norman
Program Co-chairs