Aims And Topics

The PEPM Symposium/Workshop series aims to bring 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 2008 PEPM workshop will be based on a broad interpretation of semantics-based program manipulation and continue last year's 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'08 include, but are not limited to:

• 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.