Archive for March, 2005

Please do not adjust your set

Tuesday, March 29th, 2005

Test Card

We have received reports of passing pockets of hot air in the locality. Early reports of shoppers panic-buying pairs of trousers remain unsubstantiated.

Our engineers have been busy tracking this matter down and the most likely causes are as follows:

  • Gaps in your service may have been caused by BCTCS ‘05.

  • Expect further interruption in the form of MGS ‘05.

Stay tuned for further developments.

One hot minute

Tuesday, March 15th, 2005

Main points of action from today’s meeting:

1. Peter and James etup user downloads for the newly revised Epigram 1 (now better, faster and with some support for includes) now living under cvs at Nottingham. This includes the need for a thorough clean out of the ‘durham’ directory as it’s in a state.

– nb. e-pig.org is not accessable to us at the moment so we must find a stop gap home until that situation is cleared up

2. Conor to continue his final attempt at servicing Epigram 1.

3. The job opportunity relating to updating the user documentation is still open

1.0001

Monday, March 14th, 2005

Sneezy now has a copy of the cs-186 repository at epigram/durham. I just went in and blagged it. As I’ve just shipped the latest AFP notes, I propose to spend a little time tinkering around the edges with the old version. We need to get the new website live, then we need to get documentation and examples updated and visible. This may seem a bit cheeky of me, but would anybody like to volunteer to take charge of the user documentation? It’s not just because I’m lazy/busy/whatever that I don’t want to do it: if I do it, it won’t make sense. Naturally, I’ll provide some sort of statement of the rules implemented, as soon as I’ve finished changing them…

I want a warning

Wednesday, March 9th, 2005

Hi all, going back to Conor’s point about turning on warnings for debug purposes (this was brought up at the meeting too but escaped being minuted) -Wall includes too many things to be useful currently but -W gives a nice subset of errors including non-exhaustive patterns. More fine-grained controls are given HERE.

Minutes 8/3/05

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

Today we had a guest: Sebastian from Kiel.

Conor fixed a bug with unification in the old epigram. He also did some tests what happens, if we omit domains of lambdas and observed a noticable performance improvement. Hence: the new version should certainly treat lam different, but Conor may even fix this for the old epigram.

Conor noticed that the Durham cvs doesn’t work anymore, because it was on Edwin’s machine which seems to be switched off. Plan: move old cvs and homepage over to Nottingham and make it accessible from e-pig. Peter & James are looking into this.

We discussed a scheme how to realize “include” for the old version by emacs hacking: C-c C-c replaces
——————–
include Nat
———————
by
———————–
begin Nat
———————–
contents of Nat.epi
———————–
end Nat
———————–
C-c C-e does the inverse. Since it involves emacs hacking, Conor will do it himself.

Four.epig does work now. Updating the webpage doesn’t due to too much stickyness in the directory.

Conor gave an overview over the new version of the tutorial, which he has to finish by tomorrow.

Meeting 1/3/05

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

Today we had the meeting of dilletantes. That is the dilletante is me and not Peter who was also present. We were trying to get epigram to add two and two because Peter told me that this would be possible now. Obviously, we failed. First the current version of the parser refused to parse the second definition in tests/Four.epig.After some experiments we realized that it didn’t like the %-signs so we got rid of them and successfully parsed the whole story but the output of four still shows only the unevaluated definition. Maybe this is a feature?