Several European computer science associations have joined in an effort to establish a high quality conference series on programming and programming languages. This
series, the European Symposium on Programming, is a successor to the Colloque
sur la Programmation and the Gl-workshops on Programmiersprachen und
Programme ntwicklung (Programming languages and program development). The first
such conference, ESOP 86, was held at the Universit'at des Saarlandes, Saarbriicken,
from March 17-19, 1986. The program committee received about 100 submitted papers
from 19 countries, 28 articles were selected for the conference. The committee faced the
difficult task to give ESOP a flavour which would distinguish it from conferences like
ICALP, STACS and CAAP. All committee members decided that ESOP should contain
papers about "theory based practice" resp. "theoretical papers of practical relevance".
Therefore quite a number of high quality papers were rejected because it was felt that
their practical relevance was not convincingly argued. On the other side, the committee
regret at the small number of submissions on programming methodology. The emphasis
of the ESOP 86 programme is on logic and functional programming languages and their
implementation, on semantics, parallelism, compilation and term rewriting systems.