Partial Evaluation and (Semantics-based) Program Manipulation

Once you are done with your contribution for the Software Transformation Systems workshop in Portland (co-located with OOPSLA/GPCE), you should start thinking about your contribution to PEPM 2007, which I am chairing together with Ramalingam from IBM.

Last year PEPM broadened its mission from a narrow focus on partial evaluation techniques and applications, to all topics concerned with analysis and manipulation of programs. In particular, the aim is to attract work that applies such techniques to real languages and large code bases. That is, not just design of clever techniques, but also validation of these techniques in practice. The website provides extensive advice for authors of research and tool presentation papers.

• Program and model manipulation techniques such as transformations driven by rules, patterns, or analyses, partial evaluation, specialization, slicing, symbolic execution, refactoring, aspect weaving, decompilation, and obfuscation.
• Program analysis techniques that are used to drive program/model manipulation such as abstract interpretation, static analysis, binding-time analysis, dynamic analysis, constraint solving, and type systems.
• Analysis and transformation for programs/models with advanced features such as objects, generics, ownership types, aspects, reflection, XML type systems, component frameworks, and middleware.
• Techniques that treat programs/models as data objects including meta-programming, generative programming, staged computation, and model-driven program generation and transformation.
• Application of the above techniques including experimental studies, engineering needed for scalability, and benchmarking. Examples of application domains include legacy program understanding and transformation, domain-specific language implementations, scientific computing, middleware frameworks and infrastructure needed for distributed and web-based applications, resource-limited computation, and security.

We especially encourage papers that break new ground including descriptions of how program/model manipulation tools can be integrated into realistic software development processes, descriptions of robust tools capable of effectively handling realistic applications, and new areas of application such as rapidly evolving systems, distributed and webbased programming including middleware manipulation, model-driven development, and on-the-fly program adaptation driven by run-time or sttistical analysis.