Krishnamurthi Shriram, Ramakrishnan C.R. (Eds.) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages

4th International Symposium, PADL 2002, Portland, OR, USA, January 19-20, 2002. Proceedings. — Springer, 2002. — 356 p.Declarative languages build on sound theoretical bases to provide attractive frameworks for application development. These languages have been successfully applied to a wide variety of real-world situations including database management, active networks, software engineering, and decision-support systems. New developments in theory and implementation expose fresh opportunities. At the same time, the application of declarative languages to novel problems raises numerous interesting research issues. These well-known questions include scalability, language extensions for application deployment, and programming environments. Thus, applications drive the progress in the theory and implementation of declarative systems, and in turn benefit from this progress. The International Symposium on Practical Applications of Declarative Languages (PADL) provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, and implementors of declarative languages to exchange ideas on current and novel application areas and on the requirements for effective use of declarative systems. The fourth PADL symposium was held in Portland, Oregon, on January 19 and 20, 2002. Thirty-seven papers were submitted in response to the call for papers. Each paper was reviewed by at least three referees. Eighteen papers were selected for presentation at the symposium. The symposium included invited talks by Veronica Dahl (Simon Fraser University) on “How to Talk to Your Computer so that It Will Listen”; Catherine Meadows (Naval Research Laboratory) on “Using a Declarative Language to Build an Experimental Analysis Tool”; and J. Strother Moore (University of Texas-Austin) on “Single-Threaded Objects in ACL2”. Every member of the program committee went the extra mile to give constructive, detailed feedback on submitted papers. Additional reviewers were brought in to help the program committee evaluate the submissions. We gratefully acknowledge their service. This workshop was co-located with the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2002). It was sponsored by COMPULOG AMERICAS, a network of research groups dedicated to promoting research in logic programming and related areas, by the Association for Logic Programming (ALP), the ACM, and the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems (EAPLS). We also thank Brown University, SUNY at Stony Brook, and the University of Texas at Dallas for generously making their resources available for the organization of the symposium. The support of many individuals was crucial to the success of the symposium. We thank John Launchbury (POPL general chair) and Kelly Atkinson (Conference Secretary) for general organizational help. We thank Gopal Gupta, the conference chair, for coordinating the organization of the symposium. We also thank Paul Graunke, who helped us develop and manage the software used to submit and review papers, and Samik Basu, who assisted in putting the final proceedings together.