Dear Readers:

This final number of J.UCS in the year 1997 contains 4 papers, two of which are really "late-comers" of the Special Issues edited by Professor Boerger in April and May this year, respectively.

This is not only a time to wish you the very best for the festive season, and for 1998, but also to look back a bit on how J.UCS has developed. And we can look back with pride: volume three is again more substantial than the previous volumes! Thus, we are now starting the fourth full year of J.UCS with lots of optimism and energy. This is increased by the fact that Dr. Woessner from Springer has recently informed us that Springer agrees that J.UCS will remain free of charge for the time being! A special subscription mechanism (that will allow to copy J.UCS into local servers for faster access both from CD ROM's or from the Web, whatever is more convenient) is planned for the future, probably to take effect in 1999. By that time, J.UCS will contain some 4.000 pages of high quality material, and will have still more deeply established itself as one of the leading electronic journals in computer science.

It is now time to thank the editors, the contributors, and the readers. Stay tuned for further interesting stuff in J.UCS!

With very best wishes, from myself, the two other Editors-in-Chief Cris Calude and Arto Salomaa, and the J.UCS team in Graz/Austria, particularly (in alphabetical order) Michaela Gmeindl, Dana Kaiser, Harald Krottmaier and Klaus Schmaranz.