[Grace-interest] News from Grace-land

[Andrew P. Black]

A few news items to share with you.  Last week, James Noble and Andrew Black were both at PLDI in Beijing, and gave a short Grace tutorial.
We had some interesting discussions with the participants, which included both teachers and language designers, and are encouraged by the growing interest in Grace

We also heard last week that the paper "Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty" that we had submitted to Onward! has been accepted.  A copy of the submission is on the Gracelang web site.  ( http://gracelang.org/documents/onward-draft2012.pdf )  Over the next month we will be revising the paper in line with the requests made by the referees, so if you have comments, suggestions, or hints on areas needing clarification, this would be an excellent time to send them to us.

Finally, a reminder that a prototype implementation of Grace, called minigrace, is available (start at http://gracelang.org/applications/minigrace/ ).   The compiler is written in Grace, and is complete enough to compile itself, so although there is much work that still needs to be done, we are making progress.  A few students and professors in Wellington, Pomona and Portland are spending their winters and summers writing Grace code.

If you just want to try out some simple scripts, minigrace will run in any javascript-enabled web browser: no download or installation is needed.  Just point your browser at http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~mwh/minigrace/js/

	Andrew