The proper treatment and choice of the basic data structures is an important and complex part in the process of program construction. Algebraic methods provide techniques for data abstraction and the structured specification, validation and analysis of data structures. This volume originates from a workshop organized within ESPRIT Project 432 METEOR, An Integrated Formal Approach to Industrial Software Development, held in Mierlo, The Netherlands, September 1989. The volume includes five invited contributions based on workshop talks given by A. Finkelstein, P. Klint, C.A. Middelburg, E.-R. Olderog, and H.A. Partsch. Ten further papers by members of the METEOR team are based on talks given at the workshop. The workshop was a successor to an earlier one held in Passau, Germany, June 1987, the proceedings of which were published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 394.

This book demonstrates that the concept of an instruction sequence offers a novel and useful viewpoint on issues relating to diverse subjects in computer science. Selected issues relating to well-known subjects from the theory of computation and the area of computer architecture are rigorously investigated in this book thinking in terms of instruction sequences. The subjects from the theory of computation, to wit the halting problem and non-uniform computational complexity, are usually investigated thinking in terms of a common model of computation such as Turing machines and Boolean circuits. The subjects from the area of computer architecture, to wit instruction sequence performance, instruction set architectures and remote instruction processing, are usually not investigated in a rigorous way at all.