This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FST&TCS '96, held in Hyderabad, India, in December 1996.The volume presents 28 revised full papers selected from a total of 98 submissions; also included are four invited contributions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational geometry, process algebras, program semantics, algorithms, rewriting and equational-temporal logics, complexity theory, and type theory.