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B. Gramlich, S. Lucas:
"Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming (Special Issue, Journal of Symbolic Computation): Editorial";
Journal of Symbolic Computation, 40 (2005), 1; 745 - 747.

Reduction strategies in rewriting and programming have attracted an
increasing attention within the last years. New types of reduction
strategies have been invented and investigated, and new results on
rewriting / computation under particular strategies have been obtained. Research in this field ranges from primarily theoretical questions aboutreduction strategies to very practical application and implementation issues. The need for a deeper understanding of reduction strategies in rewriting and programming, both in theory and practice, is obvious, since they bridge the gap between unrestricted general rewriting (computation) and (more deterministic) rewriting with particular strategies(programming). Moreover, reduction strategies provide a natural way to go from operational principles (e.g., graph and term rewriting, narrowing, lambda-calculus) and semantics (e.g., normalization, computation of values, infinitary normalization, head-normalization) to implementations of
programming languages. Therefore any progress in this area is likely tobe of interest not only to the rewriting community, but also to neighbouring fields like functional programming, functional-logic programming, and termination proofs of algorithms.

The series of Workshops on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and
Programming} (WRS) attempts to stimulate and promote research and progress in this important field. It provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of new ideasand results, recent developments, new research directions, and aims at fostering interaction and exchange between researchers and studentsactively working on such topics.

This Issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation contains
revised and extended versions of a selection of
papers that appeared in the first two editions of the workshop:
- WRS 2001 (1st Int. Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming), Utrecht, The Netherlands, May 26, 2001
- WRS 2002 (2nd Int. Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and
Programming), Copenhagen, Denmark, July 21, 2002.

The four papers that, after a thorough and rigorous reviewing process
according to the usual JSC standards of scholarship and quality, have
finally been accepted for this Special Issue, nicely reflect the
dynamism, interactions, and impact of reduction strategies in
different fields of Computer Science.