Preface: Volume 26

Abstract

This volume of Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science is the proceedings of HOOTS99, the Third International Workshop on Higher Order Operational Techniques in Semantics. HOOTS addresses fundamental principles and important innovations in the definition, analysis, and application of operational semantics for higher order languages and calculi.HOOTS99 took place on September 30 and October 1, 1999, as part of PLI 99, the colloquium on Principles, Logics, and Implementations of High-Level Programming Languages, a collection of conferences and workshops held in Paris, at the Maison de la Chimie. Andrew Gordon and Andrew Pitts co-chaired the programme committee of HOOTS99. The programme committee selected 9 papers from 25 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by three or more committee members or their subreferees.The members of the HOOTS99 programme committee were:Roberto Amadio(University of Provence)Andrew Gordon(Microsoft Research)obert Harper(Carnegie Mellon University)Alan Jeffrey(DePaul University)Jean-Jacques Lévy(INRIA Rocquencourt)Andrew Pitts(University of Cambridge)David Sands(Chalmers University)Carolyn Talcott(Stanford University)We thank Søren B. Lassen of the University of Cambridge for delivering an invited lecture on Trees and bisimulation for the pure lambda-calculus.The PLI 99 workshops, of which HOOTS99 was one, were organized by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), with the sponsorship of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France Telecom, Microsoft Research, the Ministère de l'Education nationale, de la Recherche et de la Technologie, and Trusted Logic. We thank Didier Rémy and Annick Theis-Viemont of INRIA for their organisational help. HOOTS99 was also affiliated to the ESPRIT Working Group 26142 on Applied Semantics (APPSEM); we thank the CEC for funding the costs of participants from APPSEM sites and the production costs of the preliminary proceedings that was distributed at the workshop. We also thank Mike Mislove, editor of Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, for his help with preparing the proceedings.There have been two previous HOOTS workshops. The first HOOTS workshop was organised by Andrew Gordon and Andrew Pitts on October 28-30, 1995 as one of the events within the 6-month research programme on Semantics of Computation at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. A book based on presentations at the workshop appeared in the Publications of the Newton Institute series published by Cambridge University Press. The second HOOTS workshop was organised by Andrew Gordon, Andrew Pitts, and Carolyn Talcott on December 8-11, 1997 at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Elsevier published an electronic proceedings of the second workshop as Volume 10 of Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science.Andrew Gordon and Andrew Pitts, Guest Editors