Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Programming Languages, Implementations, Logics, and Programs, PLILP '96, held in conjunction with ALP and SAS in Aachen, Germany, in September 1996. The 30 revised full papers presented in the volume were selected from a total of 97 submissions; also included are one invited contribution by Lambert Meerlens and five posters and demonstrations. The papers are organized in topical sections on typing and structuring systems, program analysis, program transformation, implementation issues, concurrent and parallel programming, tools and programming environments, lambda-calculus and rewriting, constraints, and deductive database languages.