Aims And Topics

The PEPM Symposium/Workshop series aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working in the areas of program manipulation, partial evaluation, and program generation. PEPM focuses on techniques, theory, tools, and applications of analysis and manipulation of programs.

The 2014 PEPM workshop will be based on a broad interpretation of semantics-based program manipulation and continue last years' successful effort to expand the scope of PEPM significantly beyond the traditionally covered areas of partial evaluation and specialization and include practical applications of program transformations such as refactoring tools, and practical implementation techniques such as rule-based transformation systems. In addition, the scope of PEPM covers manipulation and transformations of program and system representations such as structural and semantic models that occur in the context of model-driven development. In order to reach out to practitioners, a separate category of tool demonstration papers will be solicited.

Topics of interest for PEPM'14 include, but are not limited to:

• Program and model manipulation techniques such as: supercompilation, partial evaluation, fusion, on-the-fly program adaptation, active libraries, program inversion, slicing, symbolic execution, refactoring, decompilation, and obfuscation.

• Program analysis techniques that are used to drive program/model manipulation such as: abstract interpretation, termination checking, binding-time analysis, constraint solving, type systems, automated testing and test case generation.

• Techniques that treat programs/models as data objects including metaprogramming, generative programming, embedded domain-specific languages, program synthesis by sketching and inductive programming, staged computation, and model-driven program generation and transformation.

• Application of the above techniques including case studies of program manipulation in real-world (industrial, open-source) projects and software development processes, descriptions of robust tools capable of effectively handling realistic applications, benchmarking. Examples of application domains include legacy program understanding and transformation, DSL implementations, visual languages and end-user programming, scientific computing, middleware frameworks and infrastructure needed for distributed and web-based applications, resource-limited computation, and security.

To maintain the dynamic and interactive nature of PEPM, we will continue the category of `short papers' for tool demonstrations and for presentations of exciting if not fully polished research, and of interesting academic, industrial and open-source applications that are new or unfamiliar.

Student attendants with accepted papers can apply for a SIGPLAN PAC grant to help cover travel expenses and other support. PAC also offers other support, such as for child-care expenses during the meeting or for travel costs for companions of SIGPLAN members with physical disabilities, as well as for travel from locations outside of North America and Europe. For details on the PAC programme, see its web page.

All accepted papers, short papers included, will appear in formal proceedings published by ACM Press. In addition to printed proceedings, accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library. A special issue for Science of Computer Programming is planned with recommended papers from PEPM'14.

PEPM has also established a Best Paper award. The winner will be announced at the workshop.