POPL

Welcome to the Thirty-Fifth Symposium on the Principles of Programming Languages, held Thursday 10--Saturday 12 January 2008 in San Francisco. This volume contains 35 papers, selected from 212 submissions.

Explaining a known idea in a new way may make as strong a contribution as inventing a new idea. This year POPL, taking a leaf from ICFP, encouraged the submission of pearls: elegant essays which illustrate an idea, often by developing a short program. Pearls were held to the same high standards as all POPL submissions. We accepted three pearls in 2008. Taking a leaf from PLDI, this year each talk was twenty minutes, in order to permit a large number of talks on a wide range of subjects, while not fatiguing the audience unduly.

The program committee and additional reviewers wrote a staggering 1100 pages of reviews. Authors saw reviews in advance of the program committee meeting, and were permitted to write a response of up to 500 words. There was extensive online discussion for ten days after the author response period, culminating in a two-day meeting in Edinburgh, attended by all PC members save one (who could not obtain a visa).

Program committee members were permitted to submit papers, but such papers were accepted only if judged clearly better than the average paper accepted to the conference. There were nine PC submissions, of which two were accepted.