Author Description

ThisvolumecontainscontributedpapersfromparticipantsintheGenericP- gramming Seminar held 27 April–1May1998atthDagstuhl e Conference CenterinWadern,Germany. Genericprogrammingisasub-disciplineofcomputersciencethatdealswith?nding abstract representations of e?cient algorithms, data structures, and other software concepts, and with their systematic organization. The goal of genericprogrammingistoexpressalgorithmsanddatastructuresinabroadly adaptable,interoperableformthatallowstheirdirectuseinsoftwareconstr- tion. Amongthemostobviousachievementsofthisrelativelynewprogramming paradigmarenewlibrariesofsoftwarecomponents,bothinareasoffundam- talandbroadlyusedalgorithmsanddatastructures–theStandardTemplate Library–andinmorespecializedareassuchascomputeralgebra,graphtheory, and computational geometry. As useful as such components may be, however, theyareprobablylessimportantthantheoverallgenericprogrammingmeth- ologybeingdeveloped.