PADL 2026: The 28th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages

Declarative languages comprise several well-established classes of formalisms, namely, functional, logic, and constraint programming. Such formalisms enjoy both sound theoretical bases and the availability of attractive frameworks for application development. Indeed, they have been already successfully applied to many different real-world situations, ranging from database management to active networks to software engineering to decision support systems.

New developments in theory and implementation fostered applications in new areas. At the same time, applications of declarative languages to novel and challenging problems raise many interesting research issues, including designing for scalability, language extensions for application deployment, and programming environments. Thus, applications drive the progress in the theory and implementation of declarative systems, and benefit from this progress as well.

PADL is a well-established forum for researchers and practitioners to present original work emphasizing novel applications and implementation techniques for all forms of declarative programming, including functional and logic programming, database and constraint programming, and theorem proving.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

PADL is a well-established forum for researchers and practitioners to present original work emphasizing novel applications and implementation techniques for all forms of declarative programming, including functional and logic programming, databases and constraint programming, and theorem proving.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative applications of declarative languages
• Declarative domain-specific languages and applications
• Practical applications of theoretical results
• New language developments and their impact on applications
• Declarative languages and software engineering
• Evaluation of implementation techniques on practical applications
• Practical experiences and industrial applications
• Novel uses of declarative languages in the classroom
• Practical extensions such as constraint-based, probabilistic, and reactive languages

PADL 2026 especially welcomes new ideas and approaches related to applications, design, and implementation of declarative languages going beyond the scope of the past PADL symposia, for example, advanced database languages and contract languages, as well as verification and theorem-proving methods that rely on declarative languages.

PADL 2026 encourages students to participate in the symposium by providing some student grants to partially cover the registration and travel costs. The selection process will give preference to students who present their paper in the symposium. Students from underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

Submissions

PADL 2026 welcomes regular papers (max. 15 pages, excluding references) and short papers (max. 8 pages, excluding references) that describe original and previously unpublished research results on

• complex and/or real-world applications in industry or in other areas of research, that rely on an innovative use of declarative languages,
• tools and/or systems developed for such applications, and/or to improve practical aspects of declarative languages,
• technical results related to the practical aspects of declarative languages.

Application and systems descriptions, engineering solutions, and real-world experiences (both positive and negative) are in particular solicited. Regular and short papers will be published in the formal proceedings.

PADL 2026 also welcomes extended abstracts (max. 3 pages) on the topics above, that describe new ideas, a new perspective on already published work, or work-in-progress that is not yet ready for a full publication. Extended abstracts will be posted on the symposium website but will not be published in the formal proceedings.

All page limits exclude references. Submissions must be written in English and formatted according to the standard Springer LNCS style, see https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

The review process of PADL 2026 is double-anonymous. In your submission, please, omit your names and institutions; refer to your prior work in the third person, just as you refer to prior work by others; do not include acknowledgments that might identify you.

Additional material intended for reviewers but not for publication in the final version - for example, details of proofs - may be placed in a clearly marked appendix that is not included in the page limit. Reviewers are at liberty to ignore appendices and papers must be understandable without them.

Page numbers (and, if possible, line numbers) should appear on the manuscript to help the reviewers in writing their reports. So, for LaTeX, we recommend that authors use:

\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage{lineno}
\linenumbers 

The conference proceedings of PADL 2026 will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Work that already appeared in unpublished or informally published Workshop proceedings may be submitted but the authors should notify the program chairs where it has previously appeared. Previous PADL proceedings can be found on SpringerLink.

Papers should be submitted electronically via https://padl26.hotcrp.com.

Distinguished Papers

The authors of a small number of distinguished papers will be invited to submit a longer version for journal publication after the symposium. For papers related to logic programming, that will be in the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), and for papers related to functional programming, in Journal of Functional Programming (JFP). The extended journal submissions should be substantially (roughly 30%) extended: explanations for which there was no space, illuminating examples and proofs, additional definitions and theorems, further experimental results, implementational details and feedback from practical/engineering use, extended discussion of related work, and so on. These submissions will then be subject to the usual peer review process by the journal, although with the aim of a swifter review process by reusing original reviews from PADL.

The registration for PADL 2026 is handled separately from POPL. Please note that at least one author of each accepted paper must register specifically to PADL.

Early registration deadline is December 20, 2025.

Registration Rates for PADL 2026

The registration rates are as follows:

Registration rate includes the cost of venue, lunch, morning and afternoon coffee breaks.

For students whose registration does not serve to fulfill the requirement of an accepted paper, we offer a discount of £100 (send a request by email to Joaquín Arias joaquin.arias@urjc.es and Nada Amin namin@seas.harvard.edu).

Steps for Registering

Send an email with your first name, last name, affiliation, country, (paper id if applicable), and dietary requirements (e.g., normal, glutten-free, vegan, …) to Joaquín Arias joaquin.arias@urjc.es and Nada Amin namin@seas.harvard.edu.

Wire a bank transfer to the following account number (transfer charges assumed by the payer):

• Bank: Natwest (UK)
• Bank address: NatWest Markets Plc is 36 St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, EH2 2YB
• Account name: THE ASSOCIATION FOR LOGIC PROGRAMMING Ltd
• Account holders address: The Association for Logic Programming, Care of Marina De Vos, Dept Computer Science, University of Bath, BA2 7AY
• Sort Code: 60-02-05
• Account Number: 66462738
• BIC: NWBKGB2L
• IBAN: GB74NWBK60020566462738