POPL

Welcome to the Thirty-Sixth Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, held Wednesday, January 21st, through Friday, January 23rd, 2009, in Savannah, Georgia. This proceedings contains 36 papers, selected from 160 submissions.

Like POPL 2008, the slots for contributed talks at this year's POPL will all be twenty minutes long, a bit shorter than in previous years. Last year's experience showed that, besides allowing a larger number of papers to be presented without exhausting the audience, shorter slots actually improve the quality of most talks by encouraging speakers to highlight their main points and give their presentations a little extra polish.

The program committee and external reviewers attacked their task with tremendous thoughtfulness and energy, writing over 1000 pages of reviews in all. These were made available to the authors, who had a three-day period in which to submit a written response to be considered by the PC, together with the original reviews, in a week-long email discussion and an intensive two-day meeting in Victoria, Canada, following ICFP. Submissions from program committee members were permitted, subject to the usual proviso that they would be held to a higher standard than other submissions. Two PC submissions were received; neither was accepted.

Many in the POPL community look forward to the invited talks as one of the main highlights of the meeting. This year we are lucky to be hearing from Tim Harris (Microsoft Research, UK), Chris Barker (NYU), and Alex Simpson (University of Edinburgh).