COMPSTAT

Although no-one is, probably, too enthused about the idea, it is a fact that the development of most empirical sciences to a great extent depends on the development of data analysis methods and techniques, which, due to the necessity of application of computers for that purpose, actually means that it practically depends on the advancement and orientation of computer statistics. Every other year the International Association for Statistical Computing sponsors the organizition of meetings of individual s professiona77y involved in computational statistics. Since these meetings attract professionals from allover the world, they are a good sample for the estimation of trends in this area which some believe is a statistics proper while others claim it is computer science. It seems, though, that an increasing number of colleagues treat it as an independent scientific or at least technical discipline. This volume contains six invited papers, 41 contributed papers and, finally, two papers which are, formally, software descriptions, but it was agreed by the Program Committee that they should be included in a separate section entitled "Notes about new developments in statistical software", due to their special significance for current trends in computational statistics.