IFIP WG1.3 meeting

[Peter Padawitz <peter@issan.cs.uni-dortmund.de>]

Dear Semanticists,

Please, find enclosed a letter from Peter Padawitz which he sent to
Peter Mosses with CC to cofi-semantics in his role as one of the
reviewers of the CASL proposal for IFIP WG 1.3 group.

The main point for our group, as I understand this, is that we should
try to make the final edition of the semantics document much more easy
to penetrate for someone checking particular points rather than
studying the semantics as a whole. Of course, I fully agree and in
fact we (the authors of the semantics) intend to add a sufficiently
detailed index of terms and concepts, etc. I would be grateful for any
further suggestion in this direction to be sent directly to me ---
perhaps without involving the cofi-semantics list as a whole.

With best regards,

Andrzej Tarlecki
==============================================================================
Dear Peter,

(...)

Hartmut once asked me---as one of the CASL reviewers---to have a look at the  
CASL semantics document. I did that a little and was pretty overwhelmed by  
the complexity of the presentation, both in the informal parts and the formal  
ones. So I asked myself whether this document addresses developers of  
language extensions rather than users of the language. In both cases, I think  
it should be revised in a way to provide more support (indexes, etc.) to  
find the meaning of individual language constructs quickly. No one can be  
expected to read the almost 200 pages for answering particular questions  
about particular features. Maybe, this remark is rather obsolete 'cause---in  
a recent email to Hartmut---you said that the semantics document is regarded  
as supplementary material, while the main focus is on the CASL summary. This,  
for sure, is quite reasonable. Still, the summary might leave open certain  
questions on semantical issues, and then the right answers should be  
accessible easily. (By the way, the presentation would get a lot smoother if  
partial functions were dropped, at least from the core language...;-)

With best regards,

	Peter
==============================================================================