This special issue marks the tenth anniversary of the LOPSTR workshop. LOPSTR
started in 1991 as a workshop on Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation, but
later it broadened its scope to logic-based Program Development in general.The motivating force behind LOPSTR has been a belief that declarative paradigms
such as logic programming are better suited to program development tasks than
traditional non-declarative ones such as the imperative paradigm. Specification,
synthesis, transformation or specialisation, analysis, verification and debugging can
all be given logical foundations, thus providing a unifying framework for the whole
development process.In the past ten years or so, such a theoretical framework has indeed begun to
emerge. Even tools have been implemented for analysis, verification and specialisation.
However, it is fair to say that so far the focus has largely been on
programming-in-the-small. So the future challenge is to apply or extend these
techniques to programming-in-the-large, in order to tackle software engineering in
the real world.
Introduction to the special issue on challenges in agent-oriented software engineering
