Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Abstract

This volume contains the papers presented at POPL'04, the Thirty-First Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. The POPL conference is a forum for presentation of research on the design, foundations, analysis, transformation, implementation and verification of programming languages, programming systems and programming abstractions. This year's conference is in Venice, Italy.A total of 176 full papers were received in response to a call for papers. SIGPLAN policy forbids submission from members of the program committee. Each submission was read and reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, and often supplementary evaluations were solicited from outside experts. During a one day and a half meeting held in Paris, the submissions were discussed by the program committee as a whole, leading to the selection of 29 papers. Each paper was judged according to the originality, clarity, innovation, perceived importance, and appropriateness to the expected audience. Due to the format of the conference and the high number of submissions received, many good papers were not selected.In addition to the contributed papers, the POPL'04 program features two invited talks by Javier Esparza and Davide Sangiorgi, and one award lecture by John C. Reynolds, recipient of the 2004 SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award. The invited speakers were selected by the committee to complement and enhance the program of contributed papers.Although submissions were read and evaluated, the papers that appear in this volume may differ in form and content from the submitted papers. The conference selection process does not constitute full review of the work. It is expected that many of the papers printed here will be revised and submitted to refereed archival journals for publication.