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                    PACMPL Volume 2, Issue ICFP 2018
                            Call for Papers 

            accepted papers to be invited for presentation at
 The 23rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming 
                        St. Louis, Missouri, USA 
                       http://icfp18.sigplan.org/

### Important dates 

Submissions due:    16 March 2018 (Friday) Anywhere on Earth 
                    https://icfp18.hotcrp.com 
Author response:    2 May (Wednesday) - 4 May (Friday) 14:00 UTC
Notification:       18 May (Friday)
Final copy due:     22 June (Friday)
Conference:         24 September (Monday) - 26 September (Wednesday)

### About PACMPL

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL 
<https://pacmpl.acm.org/>) is a Gold Open Access journal publishing research 
on all aspects of programming languages, from design to implementation and 
from mathematical formalisms to empirical studies. Each issue of the journal 
is devoted to a particular subject area within programming languages and will 
be announced through publicized Calls for Papers, like this one.

### Scope

[PACMPL](https://pacmpl.acm.org/) issue ICFP 2018 seeks original papers on 
the art and science of functional programming. Submissions are invited on all 
topics from principles to practice, from foundations to features, and from 
abstraction to application. The scope includes all languages that encourage 
functional programming, including both purely applicative and imperative 
languages, as well as languages with objects, concurrency, or parallelism. 
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  * *Language Design*: concurrency, parallelism, and distribution; modules; 
components and composition; metaprogramming; type systems; interoperability; 
domain-specific languages; and relations to imperative, object-oriented, or 
logic programming.

  * *Implementation*: abstract machines; virtual machines; interpretation; 
compilation; compile-time and run-time optimization; garbage collection and 
memory management; multi-threading; exploiting parallel hardware; interfaces 
to foreign functions, services, components, or low-level machine resources.

  * *Software-Development Techniques*: algorithms and data structures; design 
patterns; specification; verification; validation; proof assistants; 
debugging; testing; tracing; profiling.

  * *Foundations*: formal semantics; lambda calculus; rewriting; type theory; 
monads; continuations; control; state; effects; program verification; 
dependent types.

  * *Analysis and Transformation*: control-flow; data-flow; abstract 
interpretation; partial evaluation; program calculation.

  * *Applications*: symbolic computing; formal-methods tools; artificial 
intelligence; systems programming; distributed-systems and web programming; 
hardware design; databases; XML processing; scientific and numerical 
computing; graphical user interfaces; multimedia and 3D graphics programming; 
scripting; system administration; security.

  * *Education*: teaching introductory programming; parallel programming; 
mathematical proof; algebra.

Submissions will be evaluated according to their relevance, correctness, 
significance, originality, and clarity. Each submission should explain its 
contributions in both general and technical terms, clearly identifying what 
has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant, and comparing it 
with previous work. The technical content should be accessible to a broad 
audience.

PACMPL issue ICFP 2018 also welcomes submissions in two separate categories 
&mdash; Functional Pearls and Experience Reports &mdash; that must be marked 
as such at the time of submission and that need not report original research 
results.  Detailed guidelines on both categories are given at the end of this 
call.

Please contact the principal editor if you have questions or are concerned 
about the appropriateness of a topic.

### Preparation of submissions

**Deadline**: The deadline for submissions is Friday, March 16, 2018, 
Anywhere on Earth (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>).  This 
deadline will be strictly enforced.

**Formatting**: Submissions must be in PDF format, printable in black and 
white on US Letter sized paper, and interpretable by common PDF tools. All 
submissions must adhere to the "ACM Small" template that is available (in 
both LaTeX and Word formats) from 
<https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions>.  For authors using 
LaTeX, a lighter-weight package, including only the essential files, is 
available from <http://sigplan.org/Resources/Author/#acmart-format>.

There is a limit of 27 pages for a full paper or 14 pages for an Experience 
Report; in either case, the bibliography will not be counted against these 
limits. These page limits have been chosen to allow essentially the same 
amount of content with the new single-column format as was possible with the 
two-column format used in past ICFP conferences. Submissions that exceed the 
page limits or, for other reasons, do not meet the requirements for 
formatting, will be summarily rejected.

See also PACMPL's Information and Guidelines for Authors at 
<https://pacmpl.acm.org/authors.cfm>.

**Submission**: Submissions will be accepted at <https://icfp18.hotcrp.com/>

Improved versions of a paper may be submitted at any point before the 
submission deadline using the same web interface.

**Author Response Period**: Authors will have a 72-hour period, starting at 
14:00 UTC on Wednesday, May 2, 2018, to read reviews and respond to them.

**Supplementary Materials**: Authors have the option to attach supplementary 
material to a submission, on the understanding that reviewers may choose not 
to look at it. The material should be uploaded at submission time, as a 
single pdf or a tarball, not via a URL. This supplementary material may or 
may not be anonymized; if not anonymized, it will only be revealed to 
reviewers after they have submitted their review of the paper and learned the 
identity of the author(s).

**Authorship Policies**: All submissions are expected to comply with the ACM 
Policies for Authorship that are detailed at 
<https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/information-for-authors>.

**Republication Policies**: Each submission must adhere to SIGPLAN's 
republication policy, as explained on the web at 
<http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Republication>.

**Resubmitted Papers**: Authors who submit a revised version of a paper that 
has previously been rejected by another conference have the option to attach 
an annotated copy of the reviews of their previous submission(s), explaining 
how they have addressed these previous reviews in the present submission. If 
a reviewer identifies him/herself as a reviewer of this previous submission 
and wishes to see how his/her comments have been addressed, the principal 
editor will communicate to this reviewer the annotated copy of his/her 
previous review. Otherwise, no reviewer will read the annotated copies of the 
previous reviews.

### Review Process

This section outlines the two-stage process with lightweight double-blind 
reviewing that will be used to select papers for PACMPL issue ICFP 2018.  We 
anticipate that there will be a need to clarify and expand on this process, 
and we will maintain a list of frequently asked questions and answers on the 
conference website to address common concerns.
 
**PACMPL issue ICFP 2018 will employ a two-stage review process.**  The first 
stage in the review process will assess submitted papers using the criteria 
stated above and will allow for feedback and input on initial reviews through 
the author response period mentioned previously. At the review meeting, a set 
of papers will be conditionally accepted and all other papers will be 
rejected.  Authors will be notified of these decisions on May 18, 2018.

Authors of conditionally accepted papers will be provided with committee 
reviews (just as in previous conferences) along with a set of mandatory 
revisions. After five weeks (June 22, 2018), the authors will provide a 
second submission. The second and final reviewing phase assesses whether the 
mandatory revisions have been adequately addressed by the authors and thereby 
determines the final accept/reject status of the paper. The intent and 
expectation is that the mandatory revisions can be addressed within five 
weeks and hence that conditionally accepted papers will in general be 
accepted in the second phase.

The second submission should clearly identify how the mandatory revisions 
were addressed. To that end, the second submission must be accompanied by a 
cover letter mapping each mandatory revision request to specific parts of the 
paper. The cover letter will facilitate a quick second review, allowing for 
confirmation of final acceptance within two weeks. Conversely, the absence of 
a cover letter will be grounds for the paper’s rejection.

**PACMPL issue ICFP 2018 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing 
process.** To facilitate this, submitted papers must adhere to two rules:

  1. **author names and institutions must be omitted**, and
  2. **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.

### Information for Authors of Accepted Papers

* As a condition of acceptance, final versions of all papers must adhere to 
the new ACM Small format. The page limits for final versions of papers will 
be increased to ensure that authors have space to respond to reviewer 
comments and mandatory revisions.

* Authors of accepted submissions will be required to agree to one of the 
three ACM licensing options: open access on payment of a fee 
(**recommended**, and SIGPLAN can cover the cost as described next); 
copyright transfer to ACM; or retaining copyright but granting ACM exclusive 
publication rights.  Further information about ACM author rights is available 
from <http://authors.acm.org>.

* PACMPL is a Gold Open Access journal. It will be archived in ACM’s Digital 
Library, but no membership or fee is required for access. Gold Open Access 
has been made possible by generous funding through ACM SIGPLAN, which will 
cover all open access costs in the event authors cannot. Authors who can 
cover the costs may do so by paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). 
PACMPL, SIGPLAN, and ACM Headquarters are committed to exploring routes to 
making Gold Open Access publication both affordable and sustainable.

* ACM offers authors a range of copyright options, one of which is Creative 
Commons CC-BY publication; this is the option recommended by the PACMPL 
editorial board. A reasoned argument in favour of this option can be found in 
the article [Why CC-BY?](https://oaspa.org/why-cc-by/) published by OASPA, 
the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

* We intend that the papers will be freely available for download from the 
ACM Digital Library in perpetuity via the OpenTOC mechanism.

* ACM Author-Izer is a unique service that enables ACM authors to generate 
and post links on either their home page or institutional repository for 
visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM 
Digital Library at no charge. Downloads through Author-Izer links are 
captured in official ACM statistics, improving the accuracy of usage and 
impact measurements. Consistently linking to the definitive version of an ACM 
article should reduce user confusion over article versioning. After an 
article has been published and assigned to the appropriate ACM Author Profile 
pages, authors should visit 
<http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service> to learn how to 
create links for free downloads from the ACM DL.

* At least one author of each accepted submissions will be expected to attend 
and present their paper at the conference.  The schedule for presentations 
will be determined and shared with authors after the full program has been 
selected.  Presentations will be videotaped and released online if the 
presenter consents.

* The official publication date is the date the papers are made available in 
the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to *two weeks prior* to the 
first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the 
deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

### Artifact Evaluation

Authors of papers that are conditionally accepted in the first phase of the 
review process will be encouraged (but not required) to submit supporting 
materials for Artifact Evaluation. These items will then be reviewed by an 
Artifact Evaluation Committee, separate from the paper Review Committee, 
whose task is to assess how the artifacts support the work described in the 
associated paper. Papers that go through the Artifact Evaluation process 
successfully will receive a seal of approval printed on the papers 
themselves. Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to make the 
supporting materials publicly available upon publication of the papers, for 
example, by including them as "source materials" in the ACM Digital Library.  
An additional seal will mark papers whose artifacts are made available, as 
outlined in the ACM guidelines for artifact badging.

Participation in Artifact Evaluation is voluntary and will not influence the 
final decision regarding paper acceptance.

Further information about the motivations and expectations for Artifact 
Evaluation can be found at 
<https://icfp18.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2018-Artifacts>.

### Special categories of papers

In addition to research papers, PACMPL issue ICFP solicits two kinds of 
papers that do not require original research contributions: Functional 
Pearls, which are full papers, and Experience Reports, which are limited to 
half the length of a full paper. Authors submitting such papers should 
consider the following guidelines.

#### Functional Pearls

A Functional Pearl is an elegant essay about something related to functional 
programming. Examples include, but are not limited to:

  * a new and thought-provoking way of looking at an old idea

  * an instructive example of program calculation or proof

  * a nifty presentation of an old or new data structure

  * an interesting application of functional programming techniques

  * a novel use or exposition of functional programming in the classroom

While pearls often demonstrate an idea through the development of a short 
program, there is no requirement or expectation that they do so. Thus, they 
encompass the notions of theoretical and educational pearls.

Functional Pearls are valued as highly and judged as rigorously as ordinary 
papers, but using somewhat different criteria. In particular, a pearl is not 
required to report original research, but, it should be concise, instructive, 
and entertaining. A pearl is likely to be rejected if its readers get bored, 
if the material gets too complicated, if too much specialized knowledge is 
needed, or if the writing is inelegant. The key to writing a good pearl is 
polishing.

A submission that is intended to be treated as a pearl must be marked as such 
on the submission web page, and should contain the words "Functional Pearl" 
somewhere in its title or subtitle. These steps will alert reviewers to use 
the appropriate evaluation criteria. Pearls will be combined with ordinary 
papers, however, for the purpose of computing the conference's acceptance 
rate.

#### Experience Reports

The purpose of an Experience Report is to help create a body of published, 
refereed, citable evidence that functional programming really works &mdash; 
or to describe what obstacles prevent it from working.

Possible topics for an Experience Report include, but are not limited to:

  * insights gained from real-world projects using functional programming

  * comparison of functional programming with conventional programming in the 
context of an industrial project or a university curriculum

  * project-management, business, or legal issues encountered when using 
functional programming in a real-world project

  * curricular issues encountered when using functional programming in 
education

  * real-world constraints that created special challenges for an 
implementation of a functional language or for functional programming in 
general

An Experience Report is distinguished from a normal PACMPL issue ICFP paper 
by its title, by its length, and by the criteria used to evaluate it.

  * Both in the papers and in any citations, the title of each accepted 
Experience Report must begin with the words "Experience Report" followed by a 
colon. The acceptance rate for Experience Reports will be computed and 
reported separately from the rate for ordinary papers.
  
  * Experience Report submissions can be at most 12 pages long, excluding 
bibliography.

  * Each accepted Experience Report will be presented at the conference, but 
depending on the number of Experience Reports and regular papers accepted, 
authors of Experience reports may be asked to give shorter talks.
  
  * Because the purpose of Experience Reports is to enable our community to 
accumulate a body of evidence about the efficacy of functional programming, 
an acceptable Experience Report need not add to the body of knowledge of the 
functional-programming community by presenting novel results or conclusions. 
It is sufficient if the Report states a clear thesis and provides supporting 
evidence. The thesis must be relevant to ICFP, but it need not be novel.

The review committee will accept or reject Experience Reports based on 
whether they judge the evidence to be convincing. Anecdotal evidence will be 
acceptable provided it is well argued and the author explains what efforts 
were made to gather as much evidence as possible. Typically, more convincing 
evidence is obtained from papers which show how functional programming was 
used than from papers which only say that functional programming was used. 
The most convincing evidence often includes comparisons of situations before 
and after the introduction or discontinuation of functional programming. 
Evidence drawn from a single person's experience may be sufficient, but more 
weight will be given to evidence drawn from the experience of groups of 
people.

An Experience Report should be short and to the point: it should make a claim 
about how well functional programming worked on a particular project and why, 
and produce evidence to substantiate this claim. If functional programming 
worked in this case in the same ways it has worked for others, the paper need 
only summarize the results &mdash; the main part of the paper should discuss 
how well it worked and in what context. Most readers will not want to know 
all the details of the project and its implementation, but the paper should 
characterize the project and its context well enough so that readers can 
judge to what degree this experience is relevant to their own projects. The 
paper should take care to highlight any unusual aspects of the project. 
Specifics about the project are more valuable than generalities about 
functional programming; for example, it is more valuable to say that the team 
delivered its software a month ahead of schedule than it is to say that 
functional programming made the team more productive.

If the paper not only describes experience but also presents new technical 
results, or if the experience refutes cherished beliefs of the 
functional-programming community, it may be better off submitted it as a full 
paper, which will be judged by the usual criteria of novelty, originality, 
and relevance. The principal editor will be happy to advise on any concerns 
about which category to submit to.


### ICFP Organizers 

General Chair: Robby Findler (Northwestern University, USA)

Artifact Evaluation Co-Chairs: Simon Marlow (Facebook, UK) 
                               Ryan R. Newton (Indiana University, USA)
Industrial Relations Chair: Alan Jeffrey (Mozilla Research, USA) 
Programming Contest Organiser: Matthew Fluet (Rochester Institute of 
Technology, USA) 
Publicity and Web Chair: Lindsey Kuper (Intel Labs, USA) 
Student Research Competition Chair: Ilya Sergey (University College London, 
UK) 
Video Co-Chairs: Jose Calderon (Galois, Inc., USA)
                 Nicolas Wu (University of Bristol, UK)
Workshops Co-Chair: David Christiansen (Indiana University, USA)
                    Christophe Scholliers (Universiteit Gent, Belgium)


### PACMPL Volume 2, Issue ICFP 2018

Principal Editor: Matthew Flatt (Univesity of Utah, USA)

Review Committee: 

Sandrine Blazy (IRISA, University of Rennes 1, France)
David Christiansen (Indiana University, USA)
Martin Elsman (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Marco Gaboardi (University at Buffalo, CUNY, USA)
Sam Lindley (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Heather Miller (Northweastern University, USA / EPFL, Switzerland)
J. Garrett Morris (University of Kansas, USA)
Henrik Nilsson (University of Nottingham, UK)
François Pottier (Inria, France)
Alejandro Russo (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Ilya Sergey (University College London, UK)
Michael Sperber (Active Group GmbH, Germany)
Wouter Swierstra (Utrecht University, UK)
Éric Tanter (University of Chile, Chile)
Katsuhiro Ueno (Tohoku University, Japan)
Niki Vazou (University of Maryland, USA)
Jeremy Yallop (University of Cambridge, UK)

External Review Committee:

Michael D. Adams (University of Utah, USA)
Amal Ahmed (Northeastern University, USA)
Nada Amin (University of Cambridge, USA)
Zena Ariola (University of Oregon)
Lars Bergstrom (Mozilla Research)
Lars Birkedal (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Edwin Brady ( University of St. Andrews, UK)
William Byrd (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA)
Giuseppe Castagna (CRNS / University of Paris Diderot, France)
Sheng Chen (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA)
Koen Claessen (Chalmers University ot Technology, Sweden)
Ugo Dal Lago (University of Bologna, Italy / Inria, France)
David Darais (University of Vermont, USA)
Joshua Dunfield (Queen’s University, Canada)
Richard Eisenberg (Bryn Mawr College, USA)
Matthew Fluet (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
Nate Foster (Cornell University, USA)
Jurriaan Hage (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
David Van Horn (University of Maryland, USA)
Zhenjiang Hu (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Suresh Jagannathan (Purdue University, USA)
Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research, UK)
Naoki Kobayashi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Neelakantan Krishnaswami (University of Cambridge, UK)
Kazutaka Matsuda (Tohoku University, Japan)
Trevor McDonell (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Hernan Melgratti (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Akimasa Morihata (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Aleksandar Nanevski (IMDEA Software Institute, Spain)
Kim Nguyễn (University of Paris-Sud, France)
Cosmin Oancea (DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira (University of Hong Kong, China)
Tomas Petricek (University of Cambridge, UK)
Benjamin Pierce (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Christine Rizkallah (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Tom Schrijvers (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Manuel Serrano (Inria, France)
Jeremy Siek (Indiana University, USA)
Josef Svenningsson (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Nicolas Tabareau (Inria, France)
Dimitrios Vytiniotis (Microsoft Research, UK)
Philip Wadler (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Meng Wang (University of Kent, UK)