[Grace-core] minutes of teleconference 23-24.5.2013

[James Noble]

James - touring the world, giving talks
Andrew - getting married
Kim - writing little graphics stuff
Michael - stuff
Tim - writing proposal ?

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Talked about plans - aiming for a revised specification around the time of ECOOP.

main things to do 
 - work over the document
 - revise the grammar, including working out the offside rule
 - semantics: self-interpreter? 

other things that we need to work on somehow:
(- inheritance)
- type system
- numbers 
- collections?

* libraries
- collections 
- graphics 

* UI

* How should we handle control flow: as we do now?  shift/reset?

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Next meeting - Next week - http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=grace+telecon&iso=20130528T14&p1=224

9am NZ Wed May 29
2pm San Francisco Tue May 28
10pm London Tue May 28

Tuesday 2 July - informal Grace workshop at ECOOP.

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James's collated random comments from various talks: 

CSEE&T - 

someone clapped the example code!
 people asked questions about syntax.  -- why ==, why := etc
 two requests for relationships
 someone mentioned resolve - http://resolve.cs.clemson.edu/interface

ORACLE

* Laurie Tratt pointed out that our operator-priority rule is context sensitive
    - we could pull that condition out of the grammar and put it in a post-pass

* Guy Steele liked this overall (esp pattern matching) but wondered about our use of the word "block"

* someone asked about documentation = how can we write components other people can understand?
 - literate Grace?
 - ease of exploration?

* default arguments would be good (as expressions evaluated at each call)


UBC & Philippe Kruchten

* Gregor is teaching Racket/HTDP 1st half, then Java inverted curriculum 2nd half

Philippe's quetsions:
 - Numbers - real ones, not just Number
 - what if you redefine "while"
 - exceptions? (which I didn't talk about)
 - concurrency? (which I didn't talk about)
 - "brackets around return" - detailed question about the slide
 - why x vs x:=
 - why "!foo" not "not foo"
 - finalizers?
 - sets & tuples,   set comprehensions
 - list of graded comparative examples (ideally vs Java, C, Python etc)

we need to provide examples: KWIC, Pascal's Triangle, Wirth's A+DS=P,  Software tools?