Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Welcome to Rome and to POPL 2013, the fortieth edition of the ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. Rome is a beautiful town, with an incredible millennial history in culture, art, and science, and fantastic opportunities for enjoying the Italian lifestyle, historic sites and museums. POPL 2013 is co-located with new and well-established conferences and workshops in programming languages and systems: 14th Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation conference; Workshop on Synthesis, Verification, and Analysis of Rich Models; 15th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages; Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation; 1st Interference and Dependence workshop; 1st Workshop on Behaviours and Types; Workshop on Data Driven Functional Programming; 7th Programming Languages meets Program Verification workshop; 2nd Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop; and Off The Beaten Track: Underrepresented Problems for Programming Language Researchers. Confirming the long standing tradition and attention of POPL to students and young researchers, the Programming Language Mentoring Workshop and the TutorialFest will provide the necessary warm-up for a full immersion in POPL! POPL 2013 had an absolute record of submissions: 238 papers have been submitted and reviewed, in single-blind process, by the Program Committee (PC) and the External Review Committee (ERC). Each paper has been reviewed by 4 reviewers: 3 from PC and 1 from ERC, except for PCauthored papers reviewed by ERC members only, with a load of up to 28 papers for some PC members and 6 for some ERC members. 12 further external reviewers helped in providing expert evaluations in specific situations. Ultimately 947 reviews have been produced and 85% of the papers submitted had at least one expert reviewer, as a proof of the great attention and effort spent in making the selection as rigorous as possible. The PC met in person in Paris over two days at Ecole Normale Superieure. All PC members were present at the meeting and, out of 238 submissions, 43 papers were accepted (18%). Our gratitude goes to the PC, ERC, and all outside reviewers and subreviewers for their attention, dedication and patience. We are firmly convinced that the POPL standard is the highest possible in Computer Science, and that the reviews produced are the best around. We thank the HotCRP software development team for providing a great tool in managing submissions, reviews and the final conference program set-up. The POPL 2013 program covers most topics in nowadays research in programming languages, including 4 outstanding invited talks by Georges Gonthier (Microsoft Research, UK), Andrew Myers (Cornell University), Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University and ACM Robin Milner Award), and Noah Goodman (Stanford University). Due to time constraints over 3 full days, POPL 2013 is structured in two parallel tracks. We did our best in order to reduce the possible overlap of topics among parallel sessions. Of course this can only be a partial solution and we apologize if you cannot attend all presentations you would like because of this. A great support has been obtained this year from leading companies and institutions, enabling us to keep the access to the conference, in particular for students, relatively low-cost if considered the location. The contribution of start-up companies having their roots into our community and in particular into scientific achievements appeared in POPL is particularly welcome and deserves attention and gratitude.