Automata, Languages and Programming

ICALP 2009, the 36th edition of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, was held on the island of Rhodes, July 6-10, 2009. ICALP is a series of annual conferences of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) which ?rst took place in 1972. This year, the ICALP program consisted of the established track A (focusing on algorithms, complexity and games) and track B (focusing on logic, automata, semantics and theory of programming), and of the recently introduced track C (in 2009 focusing on foundations of networked computation). In response to the call for papers, the Program Committee received 370 s- missions: 223 for track A, 84 for track B and 63 for track C. Out of these, 108 papers were selected for inclusion in the scienti?c program: 62 papers for track A, 24 for track B and 22 for track C. The selection was made by the Program Committees based on originality, quality, and relevance to theoretical computer science. The quality of the manuscripts was very high indeed, and many dese- ing papers could not be selected. ICALP 2009 consisted of ?ve invited lectures and the contributed papers. Thisvolumeoftheproceedingscontainsallcontributedpaperspresentedintrack AtogetherwiththepapersbytheinvitedspeakersKurtMehlhorn(Max-Planck- Institut fu ..r Informatik, Saarbru ..cken)and Christos Papadimitriou(University of California at Berkeley). A companion volume contains all contributed papers presented at the conference in track B and track C, together with the papers by the invited speakers Georg Gottlob (University of Oxford), Tom Henzinger ' (EcolePolytechniqueF' ed' eraledeLausanne),andNoamNisan(Google,TelAviv, and Hebrew University).