Conference Report
Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments
(WLPE'06)

Wim Vanhoof
University of Namur
Belgium

Editor: Enrico Pontelli

This year's edition of WLPE, the Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments, took place high above downtown Seattle, on the 30th floor of the welcoming Sheraton and Towers hotel. The aim of the workshop was to provide an informal meeting for researchers working on (logic-based) methods and tools that support the development and analysis of programs.

The workshop attracted 12 submissions of which the program committee decided to accept 9 for presentation, resulting in quite a busy program for a single afternoon. The presentations were grouped around 3 major themes.

First, we had a session on debugging and tracing, with presentations by Remko Tronḉon (a delta debugger for ILP query execution), Pierre Deransart ({on using tracer driver for external dynamic process observation),  and Bharat Jayaraman (JavaTA: a logic-based debugger for Java).

Then followed a session on program analysis, with talks by Manuel Hermenegildo (towards execution time estimation for logic programs via static analysis and profiling), Michael Hanus (CurryBrowser: a generic analysis environment for Curry programs), German Puebla (some issues on incremental abstraction-carrying code), and Wim Vanhoof (fingerprinting logic programs).

Finally, we had a session on tools, with presentations by Siddharth Chitnis (ExSched: solving constraint satisfaction problems with the spreadsheet paradigm) and John Gallagher (a web-based tool combining different type analyses).

Among the participants to the workshop, there were 16 who registered oficially for WLPE, coming from 9 different countries. The workshop itself was an informal and lively event, with high-quality presentations being interleaved with an appropriate amount of discussion.

Although it was a long and intense afternoon, it was first of all a very pleasant and instructive one.