FLOPS: Call for Papers

FLOPS solicits original papers in all areas of declarative programming:

• functional, logic, functional-logic programming
• rewriting systems
• formal methods and model checking
• program transformations and program refinements
• developing programs with the help of theorem provers or SAT/SMT solvers
• verifying properties of programs using declarative programming techniques
• foundations, language design, implementation issues (compilation techniques, memory management, run-time systems, etc.)
• applications and case studies

FLOPS promotes cross-fertilization among different styles of declarative programming. Therefore, research papers must be written to be understandable by a wide audience of declarative programmers and researchers. In particular, each submission should explain its contributions in both general and technical terms, clearly identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant for its area, and comparing it with previous work. Submission of system descriptions and declarative pearls are especially encouraged.

Submission Categories

Submissions should fall into one of the following categories:

• Regular research papers: they should describe new results and will be judged on originality, correctness, and significance.
• System descriptions: they should describe a working system and will be judged on originality, usefulness, and design.
• Declarative pearls: new and excellent declarative programs or theories with illustrative applications.

System descriptions and declarative pearls must be explicitly marked as such in the title.

Submissions must be unpublished and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Work that already appeared in unpublished or informally published workshops proceedings may be submitted. Authors must follow Springer’s Code of Conduct. See also the ACM SIGPLAN Republication Policy. At least one author of each accepted paper should plan to attend the conference in person to present the work: there will be no general facility for online or pre-recorded presentation (but we will do our best to accommodate visa issues and similar unavoidable obstacles).

Submissions must be written in English and can be up to 15 pages excluding references, though system descriptions and pearls are typically shorter. The formatting has to conform to Springer’s guidelines. Regular research papers should be supported by proofs and/or experimental results. In case of lack of space, this supporting information should be made accessible otherwise (e.g., a link to an anonymized web page or an appendix, which does not count towards the page limit). However, it is the responsibility of the authors to guarantee that their paper can be understood and appreciated without referring to this supporting information; reviewers may simply choose not to look at it when writing their review.

Papers should be submitted electronically at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=flops2024.

Reviewing Process

FLOPS 2024 will employ a light double-blind reviewing process; reviewers will not see author names until they submit a review. To facilitate this, submitted papers must adhere to two rules:

• author names and institutions must be omitted, and
• references to authors’ own related work should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work…” but rather “We build on the work of…”).

The purpose of this process is to help the reviewers come to an initial judgement about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized). In addition, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For instance, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web or give talks on their research ideas.

Publication

The proceedings will be published by Springer International Publishing in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

We expect to invite the authors of four to seven of the best papers to submit an extended version of their FLOPS paper to a special issue which will appear in the journal Science of Computer Programming (SCP).

Important Dates

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE = UTC-12).

• Abstract due: Wed 6th Dec 2023
• Submission deadline: Wed 13th Dec 2023
• Notifications: Fri 26th Jan 2024
• Final versions due: Wed 28th Feb 2024