John Hatcliff - Böcker

ETAPS 2003 was the sixth instance of the European Joint Conferences on T- ory and Practice of Software. ETAPS is an annual federated conference that was establishedin1998bycombininganumberofexistingandnewconferences.This yearitcomprised?veconferences(FOSSACS,FASE,ESOP,CC,TACAS),14- tellite workshops (AVIS, CMCS, COCV, FAMAS, Feyerabend, FICS, LDTA, RSKD, SC, TACoS, UniGra, USE, WITS and WOOD), eight invited lectures (not including those that are speci?c to the satellite events), and several tu- rials. We received a record number of submissions to the ?ve conferences this year: over 500, making acceptance rates fall below 30% for every one of them. Congratulations to all the authors who made it to the ?nal program! I hope that all the other authors still found a way of participating in this exciting event and I hope you will continue submitting. A special event was held to honour the 65th birthday of Prof. Wlad Turski, one of the pioneers of our young science. The deaths of some of our "fathers" in thesummerof2002-Dahl,DijkstraandNygaard-remindedusthatSoftware Science and Technology is, perhaps, no longer that young.Against this sobering background, it is a treat to celebrate one of our most prominent scientists and his lifetime of achievements. It gives me particular personal pleasure that we are able to do this for Wlad during my term as chairman of ETAPS.

As the complexity of software increases, researchers and practicioners continue to seek better techniques for engineering the construction of evolution of software. Partial evaluation is an attractive technology for modern software construction since it provides automatic tools for software specialization and is based on rigorous semantic foundations. This book is based on a school held at DIKU Copenhagen, Denmark in summer 1998 during which leading researchers summarized the state of the art in partial evaluation. The lectures presented survey the foundations of partial evaluation in a clear and rigorous manner and practically introduce several existing partial evaluators with numerous examples. The second part of the book is devoted to more sophisticated theoretical aspects, advances systems and applications, and highlights open problems and challenges. The book is ideally suited for advanced courses and for self study.