Programming Languages and Systems: 8th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP’99 Held as Part of the Joint European Conference

This is the second time that of ESOP has formed part of the ETAPS cluster of conferences, workshops, working group meetings and other associated activities. One of the results of colocatingso many conferences is a reduction in the number of possibilities to submit a paper to a European conference and the increased competition between conferences that occurs when boundaries between indiv- ual conferences have not yet become well established. This may have been the reason for the fact that only 44 submission were received this year. On the other hand we feel that the average quality of submissions has gone up, and thus the program committee was able to select 18 good papers, only one less than the year before. The program committee did not meet physically, and all discussion was done usinga Web-driven data base system. Despite some mixed feelings there is an overall tendency to appreciate the extra time available for giving papers a s- ond look and really going into comments made by other program committee members. I want to thank my fellow program committee members for the work they have put into the refereeingprocess and the valuable feedback they have given to authors. I want to thank the referees for their work and many detailed comments, and ?nally I want to thank everyone who has submitted a paper: without authors, no conference.