The Functional Programming Group at the University of Glasgow was started in 1986 by John Hughes and Mary Sheeran. Since then it has grown in size and strength, becoming one of the largest computing science research groups at Glasgow and earning an international reputation. The first Glasgow Functional Programming Workshop was organised in the summer of 1988. Its purpose was threefold: to provide a snapshot of all the research going on within the group, to share research ideas between Glaswegians and colleagues in the U.K. and abroad, and to introduce research students to the art of writing and presenting papers at a semi-formal (but still local and friendly) conference. The success of the first workshop has led to an annual series: Rothesay (1988), Fraserburgh (1989), Ullapool (1990). Portree (1991), Ayr (1992), and the workshop reported in these proceedings: Ayr (1993). Most participants wrote a paper that appeared in the draft proceedings (distributed at the workshop), and each draft paper was presented by one of the authors. The papers were all refereed by several other participants at the workshop, both internal and external, and the programme committee selected papers for these proceedings. Most papers have been revised twice, based firstly on feedback at the workshop, and secondly using the referee reports.

This is the proceedings of the seventh annual workshop held by the Glasgow Functional Programming Group. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a focus for new research, to foster research contacts with other functional language researchers, and to provide a platform for research students to develop their presentation skills. As in previous years, we spent three days closeted together in a pleasant seaside town, isolated from normal work commitments. We were joined by colleagues from other universities (both UK and abroad) and from industry. Workshop participants presented a short talk about their current research work, and produced a paper which appeared in a draft proceedings. These papers were then reviewed and revised in the light of discussions at the workshop and the referees' comments. A selection of those revised papers (the majority of those presented at the workshop) appears here in the published proceedings. The papers themselves cover a wide span, from theoretical work on algebras and bisimilarity to experience with a real-world medical applica tion. Unsurprisingly, given Glasgow's track record, there is a strong emphasis on compilation techniques and optimisations, and there are also several papers on concurrency and parallelism.

The Glasgow Functional Programming Group is widely recognised for its research in lazy functional languages. Once again this year, for the fifth time, we retreated to a Scottish seaside town to discuss our latest work, this time spending three days in Ayr. We were joined by a number of colleagues from other universities and from industry, with whom we have been enjoying fruitful collaboration. The workshop serves the dual purpose of ensuring that the whole group remains informed of each other's work, and of providing workshop experience for research students. Most participants presented a short talk about their work, supplemented by papers which appeared in a draft proceedings distributed at the workshop. Since then the papers have been reviewed and the majority are now published here following revision. The workshop also contained a lively discussion session on functional language applications, to which the industrial participants made very helpful contributions. One interesting feature of this volume is the number of papers addressing practical issues of realistic use of functional languages, from benchmarking and profiling, to user interfaces and file handling. It is perhaps indicative that at last lazy functional languages are being used for significantly larger applications than has been typical in the past. This type of paper is likely to feature prominently in relevant conference proceedings for the next few years. Other papers here continue to address more theoretical topics, such as program logic, semantics of non determinism, program analysis, and loop detection.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Sixth European Symposium on Programming, ESOP '96, held in Linköping, Sweden, in April 1996. The 23 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 63 submissions; also included are invited papers by Cliff B. Jones and by Simon L. Peyton Jones. The book is devoted to fundamental issues in the specification, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems; the emphasis is on research issues bridging the gap between theory and practice. Among the topics addressed are software specification and verification, programming paradigms, program semantics, advanced type systems, program analysis, program transformation, and implementation techniques.

The objective of this book is two-fold. Firstly, it is aimed at bringing to gether key research articles concerned with methodologies for knowledge discovery in databases and their applications. Secondly, it also contains articles discussing fundamentals of rough sets and their relationship to fuzzy sets, machine learning, management of uncertainty and systems of logic for formal reasoning about knowledge. Applications of rough sets in different areas such as medicine, logic design, image processing and expert systems are also represented. The articles included in the book are based on selected papers presented at the International Workshop on Rough Sets and Knowledge Discovery held in Banff, Canada in 1993. The primary methodological approach emphasized in the book is the mathematical theory of rough sets, a relatively new branch of mathematics concerned with the modeling and analysis of classification problems with imprecise, uncertain, or incomplete information. The methods of the theory of rough sets have applications in many sub-areas of artificial intelligence including knowledge discovery, machine learning, formal reasoning in the presence of uncertainty, knowledge acquisition, and others. This spectrum of applications is reflected in this book where articles, although centered around knowledge discovery problems, touch a number of related issues. The book is intended to provide an important reference material for students, researchers, and developers working in the areas of knowledge discovery, machine learning, reasoning with uncertainty, adaptive expert systems, and pattern classification.

Extends functional programming to solve I/O problems, while retaining usual verification features.

The Software Engineering and Knowledgebase Systems (SOFfEKS) Research Group of the Department of Computer Science, Concordia University, Canada, organized a workshop on Incompleteness and Uncertainty in Information Systems from October 8-9, 1993 in Montreal. A major aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers who share a concern for issues of incompleteness and uncertainty. The workshop attracted people doing fundamental research and industry oriented research in databases, software engineering and AI from North America, Europe and Asia. The workshop program featured six invited talks and twenty other presentations. The invited speakers were: Martin Feather (University of Southern CalifornialInformation Systems Institute) Laks V. S. Lakshmanan (Concordia University) Ewa Orlowska (Polish Academy of Sciences) z. Pawlak (Warsaw Technical University and Academy of Sciences) F. Sadri (Concordia University) A. Skowron (Warsaw University) The papers can be classified into four groups: rough sets and logic, concept analysis, databases and information retrieval, and software engineering. The workshop opened with a warm welcome speech from Dr. Dan Taddeo, Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science. The first day's presentations were in rough sets, databases and information retrieval. Papers given on the second day centered around software engineering and concept analysis. Sufficient time was given in between presentations to promote active interactions and numerous lively discussions. At the end of two days, the participants expressed their hope that this workshop would be continued.

The Sixth Refinement Workshop took place at City University in London from 5th to 7th January 1994. The present volume includes all of the papers which were submitted and accepted for presentation, together with two papers by invited speakers. The workshops in the series have generally occurred at one year intervals but in this last case a two year period had elapsed. These workshops have established themselves as an important event in the calendar for all those who are interested in progress in the underlying theory of refinement and in the take-up by industry of the methods supported by that theory. One of the proposed themes of the sixth workshop was the reporting of successful adoption in industry of rigorous software development methods. The programme committee was perhaps slightly disappointed by the response from industry to the call in this respect. However, the recent period could be characterised as one of consolidation, when those companies which have made the decision that formal development methods are important to their business have been adopting them where appropriate and finding them to be worthwhile. On the other hand,. the difficult economic climate which exists in most parts of the developed world is perhaps not the context within which companies still dubious about the benefits are goil'\g to opt for making major changes in their working practices.

This volume contains papers from the Eighth Z User Meeting, to be held at the University of Cambridge from 29 - 30 June 1994. The papers cover a wide range of issues associated with Z and formal methods, with particular reference to practical application. These issues include education, standards, tool support, and interaction with other design paradigms such as consideration of real-time and object-oriented approaches to development. Among the actual topics covered are: the formal specification in Z of Defence Standard 00-56; formal specification of telephone features; specifying and interpreting class hierarchies in Z; and software quality assurance using the SAZ method. Z User Workshop, Cambridge 1994 provides an important overview of current research into industrial applications of Z, and will provide invaluable reading for researchers, postgraduate students and also potential industrial users of Z.

This volume results from the four-day scientific Second International East/West Database Workshop which took place 25th-28th September 1994, in Klagenfurt, Austria, continuing a series of workshops started in Kiev in 1990 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 504, Springer, "Next Generation Information System Technology"). The aims of this workshop are twofold: first, to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of scientific achievements in the field of advanced databases that will effectively improve the building and use of future information systems; second, to establish and increase communication between research communities which were formerly separated and, therefore, had only rare opportunities to interact. It should establish contacts between researchers from the East and from the West to make exchange of ideas possible and to trigger collaborations. However, it is not only political borders which change their perviousness as a result of -or giving rise to -new autonomies or new possibilities for interaction and collaboration. The same happens with the borders between scientific areas, in particular in the dynamically evolving areas of computer science. Databases and programming languages are integrated in object oriented databases, database and information retrieval technology form together the basis for modern (multimedia) information systems. Furthermore, the borders between different information systems change and allow various forms of collaboration while maintaining different degrees of autonomy. Heterogeneous and distributed databases are enabling technologies for these systems.