This volume contains the presentations of the Fifth Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 88) held at the University of Bordeaux, February 11-13, 1988. In addition to papers presented in the regular program the volume contains abstracts of software systems demonstrations which were included in this conference series in order to show applications of research results in theoretical computer science. The papers are grouped into the following thematic sections: algorithms, complexity, formal languages, rewriting systems and abstract data types, graph grammars, distributed algorithms, geometrical algorithms, trace languages, semantics of parallelism.