The papers contained in this volume were presented at the
Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching,
held in Padova, Italy, in June 1993.
Combinatorial pattern matching addresses issues of searching
and matching of strings and more complicated patterns such
as trees, regular expressions, extended expressions, etc.
The goal is to derive nontrivial combinatorial properties
for such structures and then to exploit these properties in
order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding
computational problems. In recent years, a steady flow of
high-quality scientific studies of this subject has changed
a sparse set of isolated results into a full-fledged area of
algorithmics.
The area is expected to grow even further due to the
increasing demand for speedand efficiency that comes
especially from molecular biology and the Genome project,
but also from other diverse areas such as information
retrieval, pattern recognition, compilers, data compression,
and program analysis.