The 15th edition of the Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP 2013) was held from September 16 – 18 at the Faculdad de Informatica of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain.
The call for papers attracted 58 submissions from Australia, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, although three papers were withdrawn for various reasons. The Program Committee (PC) too had a very international feel, drawn from 16 different countries. All papers received at least 3 reviews; external reviewers contributed 69 of these reviews. Based on these reviews, the PC accepted 26 papers in all that cover a variety of topics:
- Random Testing of Purely Functional Abstract Datatypes, Stefan Holdermans
- Are Needed Redexes Really Needed? Sergio Antoy, Andy Jost
- Prolog Programming with a Map-Reduce Parallel Construct, Joana Côrte-Real, Inês Dutra, Ricardo Rocha
- Detecting decidable classes of finitely ground logic programs with function symbols, Marco Calautti, Sergio Greco, Irina Trubitsyna
- Eventual Linear Ranking Functions, Roberto Bagnara, Fred Mesnard
- Unifying the Knuth-Bendix, Recursive Path and Polynomial Orders, Akihisa Yamada, Keiichirou Kusakari, Toshiki Sakabe
- Proofs You Can Believe In: Proving Equivalences Between Prolog Semantics in Coq, Jael Kriener, Andy King, Sandrine Blazy
- Deriving the Full-Reducing Krivine Machine from the Small-Step Operational Semantics of Normal Order, Álvaro García-Pérez, Pablo Nogueira, Juan José Moreno-Navarro
- A Type Class for Bidirectionalization — Or, a Light-Weight Approach to the View-Update Problem, Kazutaka Matsuda, Meng Wang
- Reasoning About Higher-Order Relational Specifications, Yuting Wang, Kaustuv Chaudhuri, Andrew Gacek, Gopalan Nadathur
- An Operational Foundation for the Tactic Language of Coq, Wojciech Jedynak, Malgorzata Biernacka, Dariusz Biernacki
- Extensible Sparse Functional Arrays with Circuit Parallelism, John T. O’Donnell
- Decentralized Execution of Constraint Handling Rules for Ensembles, Edmund Soon Lee Lam, Iliano Cervesato
- Shape Analysis in a Functional Language by Using Regular Languages, Manuel Montenegro, Ricardo Peña, Clara Segura
- Engineering Definitional Interpreters, Jan Midtgaard, Norman Ramsey, Bradford Larsen
- Dependent Types for Enforcement of Information Flow, Erasure Policies in Heterogeneous Data Structures, Gordon Stewart, Anindya Banerjee, Aleksandar Nanevsky
- A Semantics for Weakly Encapsulated Search in Functional Logic Programs, Jan Christiansen, Michael Hanus, Fabian Reck, Daniel Seidel
- Coq: The world’s best macro assembler?Nick Benton, Andrew Kennedy, Jonas Braband Jensen, Pierre-Evariste Dagand
- A Synthetic Operational Account of Call-by-Need Evaluation, Olivier Danvy, Ian Zerny
- A Logical Correspondence between Natural Semantics and Abstract Machines, Robert Simmons, Ian Zerny
- A Declarative and Bidirectional Model Transformation Approach Based on Graph Co-spans, Yngve Lamo, Florian Mantz, Adrian Rutle, Juan De Lara
- Theory Propagation and Rational Trees, Ed Robbins, Andy King, Jacob Howe
- Efficient Computation of Program Equivalence for Confluent Concurrent Constraint Programming, Luis Pino, Filippo Bonchi, Frank Valencia
- A Parameterized Graph Transformation Calculus for Finite Graphs with Monadic Branches, Kazuyuki Asada, Soichiro Hidaka, Hiroyuki Kato, Zhenjiang Hu, Keisuke Nakano
- Time Refinement in a Functional Synchronous Language, Louis Mandel, Cédric Pasteur, Marc Pouzet
- Finite Type Extensions in Constraint Programming, Rafael Caballero, Peter Stuckey, Antonio Tenorio Fornés
In addition to the accepted papers, the program also consisted of two invited talks. Ilya Sergey gave a talk on “Monadic Abstract Interpreters” and Peter Stuckey on “Search is dead — long live proof”. The latter talk celebrates the most influential PPDP paper of 2003, awarded by the PPDP steering committee, “Finding all minimal unsatisfiable subsets” by Maria Garcia de la
Banda, Peter Stuckey, and Jeremy Wazny.
Finally, the program was livened up by a singing session under the direction of Olivier Danvy (see the PPDP’13 website for the videos by Kaustuv Chaudhuri).
Putting together PPDP 2013 was a team effort. First of all, I would like to thank the authors for providing the content of the program. I would like to express my gratitude to the program committee and external reviewers, who worked very hard in reviewing papers and providing suggestions for their improvement. Thanks also go to the invited speakers, and last, but not least, to the local organizers who hosted us.