this book presents the refereed proceedings of the sixth international conference on compiler construction, cc 96, held in linköping, sweden in april 1996.the 23 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 57 submissions; also included is an invited paper by william waite entitled compiler construction: craftsmanship or engineering?. the book reports the state of the art in the area of theoretical foundations and design of compilers; among the topics addressed are program transformation, software pipelining, compiler optimization, program analysis, program inference, partial evaluation, implementational aspects, and object-oriented compilers.