Introduction to the Special Section

I F we consider Zuse’s Plankalktil the first programming language, research on computer languages is about half a century old now. During this period, languages have always been in the mainstream of computer science research. The focus of the research has perhaps shifted somewhat from efficiency (1950s) to expressivity (196Os), portability (197Os), and handling complexity (198Os), but the interest in languages never declined. At present, language designers and implementors. are faced with new challenges, for example, exploiting novel (parallel and distributed) architectures and supporting new programming methodologies like object-oriented programming. The IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Computer Languages (ICCL) brings together people working on many different aspects of programming languages, specification languages, and other kinds of computer languages. ICCL has a broad scope covering theoretical and practical work, general-purpose languages and application-specific languages, and language design as well as implementation. ICCL ‘94 is the fifth of the series of bi-annual conferences sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Languages (TCCL). As in the previous meetings, ICCL’94 strived to further its commitment to quality and diversity. The broad scope and the international character of ICCL are confirmed once again by the diverse submissions from all parts of the globe. One hundred and thirteen papers were submitted to ICCL’94, from 24 different countries. Twenty five papers were selected for presentation at the conference. In addition, the program contained two invited talks and two panel sessions. In the first invited talk, Robert Dewar addressed language evaluation, and in the second invited talk, Patrick Cousot addressed higher order abstraction. The papers in this issue cover the best software engineeringrelated work presented at ICCL’94. The initial selection was done by the ICCL’94 program committee and conference chairman, in cooperation with TSE. Each selected ICCL’94 paper was improved substantially by the authors and then resubmitted to TSE. The papers were again formally refereed. The four accepted papers deal with issues ranging from lan-