Research Topics in Functional Programming

This volume is, essentially, the proceedings of a meeting which took place at The University of Texas at Austin in August 1987. The meeting was entitled "The Institute of Declarative Programming" and was one of six such institutes hosted by UT as part of their highly successful "Year of Programming". The main part of the meeting was devoted to the presentation of research papers in the area of functional programming, and it these (or subsequently revised versions of them) that form most of the book's chapters. They form an interesting and representative collection of papers on a variety of important research topics in the field of functional programming. The ordering of topics is somewhat arbitrary; in the hope of assisting the reader to find his way around the volume here are a few words of explanation of the contents of the various chapters. For the convenience of the reader we have included two additional chapters of a more tutorial nature (the first two).