Future trends of TAPSOFT

Abstract

The TAPSOFT (Theory And Practice of SOFTwaredevelopment) conferences started in 1985 in Berlin andwere held biannually in Pisa, Barcelona, Brighton, Parisand Aarhus. In 1995, it was decided to combine TAPSOFTwith ESOP (European Symposium on Programming) into thenew conference ETAPS (European joint conference on TheoryAnd Practice of Software) which will start in 1998 inLisbon. For this reason, TAPSOFT'97 in Lille is the lastTAPSOFT in the old style combining the conferences CAAP(Colloquium on trees in Automata And Programming) andFASE (Formal Aspects of Software Engineering). The firstauthor asked a number of his colleagues from differentcountries concerning their opinions on the future trendsof theoretical computer science and software developmentscience. After a careful analysis of their replies, wehave decided to summarize the discussion under theheading of the following four trends: (1) from thediversity of mathematical concepts to the unification ofcomputational models and semantic theories; (2) fromalgebraic specification to the integration of formaltechniques; (3) from trees to graphs, graphtransformations and visual languages; and (4) fromabstract data types to object-oriented techniques andcontinuous software engineering. (0 References).