Re: Agenda for Methodology Task Group Meeting in Cachan

[Peter Mosses <mosses@csl.sri.com>]

Giuseppe Scollo wrote:

>   With programming languages, I found it most convenient to have
> three things: 
> 
>  1. Tutorial
>  2. Reference Manual
>  3. Quick Reference
> 
> Two examples of 1+2: CAML-Light, Perl. (Perl also has 3, in the form
> of a very handy _depliant_, useful to "real" users who need rapid
> memory-refresh about syntax matters and the like.) 

Links to sites where one may fetch these documents would be useful too.

> > Please send me asap any suggestion for the agenda of this Cachan meeting.
> 
>   Here's one (maybe not so urgent, but pieces of art often take long to
> get into final form):
> 
>    * www shapes of tutorial
> 
> (besides an obvious HyperLaTeX text, wouldn't it be nice to have something
> more _animated_?)

I'm supposed to be coordinating the production of a tutorial - but
recently all my CoFI time has been spent on the update of CASL to
v1.0.

In fact I gave a tutorial on CASL at ETAPS'98 - the Powerpoint slides
that I used are available:

  ftp://ftp.brics.dk/Projects/CoFI/Documents/CASL/Tutorial/

although the formatting needs improving, and the content needs
updating to CASL v1.0.  I'm currently trying to write a text based on
the slides.  N.B.: This is a tutorial on the CASL language design, not
on how to use CASL.  It is far too detailed for most purposes.

I've been wondering a bit about how to make an animated tutorial,
to be made available via standard web browsers.  As a minimum it
should be possible to type in a CASL spec and get it parsed and
statically checked - perhaps pretty-printed too - and to browse
libraries of existing specs.  For sub-languages of CASL, one might
also interface to a rewriting system that would allow terms to be
reduced to normal form; more ambitiously, one might interface to an
interactive theorem-prover for full CASL, such as Isabelle.

*** Links to examples of such web-based tutorials for other frameworks
*** would be very helpful.  Please send them to mosses@csl.sri.com,
*** then I'll send a summary to this list with my comments later.

If there are any CoFI participants who have previously created
web-based tutorials, I'd like to get the benefit of their experience,
so kindly let me know.  Volunteers to help in this (to me, quite
exciting) task would, of course, be more than welcome...

-- Peter