The usual implementation of real numbers in today's computers as floating point numbers has the well-known deficiency that most numbers can only be represented up to some fixed accuracy. Consequently, even the basic arithmetic operations cannot be performed exactly, leading to the ubiquitous round-off errors. This is a serious problem in all disciplines where high accuracy calculations are required. One of the ultimate goals of the theoretical and practical research in this area is to overcome these problems by improving the present implementations and algorithms or providing alternatives.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Real Number Computation which was held in June 19-20, 1998, in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. The workshop preceded the IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS).

The meeting aimed to present an introduction to the interdisciplinary area of Real Number Computation. The subject is understood in a broad sense and covers various different fields like Recursion Theory, Interval Analysis, Computer Arithmetic, Semantics of Programming Languages, Number Theory, and Numerical Analysis. The workshop was meant to provide researchers from these different communities an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas.

More than 30 participants from eight countries made this workshop a succesful event.

Contributions to the proceedings were invited after the workshop from all participants and were sent to referees. Comments and suggestions were forwarded to the authors who thus had a chance to amend their texts. The final versions were accepted by the editors. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all referees for their time and cooperation, and Michael Mislove for his invitation to publish the proceedings in the ENTCS series.

23rd August 1999

Abbas Edalat, David Matula and Philipp Sünderhauf, Guest Editors