Minutes of the Amsterdam meeting

[Helene.Kirchner@loria.fr]

TOOLS GROUP MEETING
Amsterdam, March 27-28, 1999

>From the notes taken by Christophe Ringeissen and Helene Kirchner

=====================
I. Saturday March 27
=====================
Participants: 
=============
Mark van den Brand
Helene Kirchner
Heiko Mantel
Till Mossakowski
Peter Mosses
Christophe Ringeissen
Axel Schairer
Andrzej Tarlecki

1. Report on  LaTeX Formatting tools for CASL
by Peter Mosses

Some changes, based on feedback from users of the preliminary CASL
package, are to be incorporated before the final version of the
package is released (probably around mid-April).

Mark van den Brand mentioned another tool developed in Amsterdam
to convert A-terms to LateX via Box expressions.

2. Presentation of the INKA system by Heiko Mantel.
A copy of slides is available at 
http://www.dfki.de/vse/staff/mantel/Slides/inka_at_cofi_march1999.ps.gz

====================
II. Sunday March 28
====================
Common session with the Language Design group
(see the report in the language mailing list)

Participants: 
=============
Hubert Baumeister
Michel Bidoit
Mark van den Brand
Bernd Krieg-Brueckner
Magne Haveraaen
Helene Kirchner
Heiko Mantel
Till Mossakowski
Peter Mosses
Christophe Ringeissen
Markus Roggenbach
Don Sanella
Axel Schairer
Guiseppe Scollo
Alexandre Zamulin

Presentation by Mark van den Brand of the A-term library and of the
CasFix format (an instantiation of A-terms for CASL).  The A-term
library has now to be enriched by a set of new functionalities to
handle CasFix.
The ATerm document is available via:
http://www.cwi.nl/pub/markvdb/aterms.ps

The mapping from the abstract syntax to CasFix is available via:
http://adam.wins.uva.nl/~markvdb/cofi/casl.html

Some simplifications are discussed in the chain rules to reduce the
size of the abstract syntax tree.  However it seems easier for tools
which do not use a parser generator to read in the ATerms if they come
along interspersed with non-terminals for the chain rules.

Currently the annotations proposed by Till in his previous presentation
are not yet handled by the Amsterdam parser.


=====================
III. Sunday March 28
=====================
Tools group session
=====================

Participants: 
=============
Michel Bidoit
Mark van den Brand
Bernd Krieg-Brueckner
Helene Kirchner
Heiko Mantel
Till Mossakowski
Peter Mosses
Christophe Ringeissen
Markus Roggenbach
Axel Schairer
Guiseppe Scollo


1. Repository of parsed specifications.

Examples of basic data types  and basic specifications are
available in Bremen at
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~cofi/CASL/lib/basic/

This is proposed as the basis for a repository of (un-)successfully
parsed CASL specifications. A proposition for a data base on the Web
for this repository is going to be studied in Amsterdam by
Mark.


2. Till presented how mixfix parsing is implemented and integrated in 
the HOL-CASL parser. A similar approach is foreseen in the 
Amsterdam parser.


3. Mark reported on the stand-alone CASL parser implementation in
Amsterdam based on the SGLR (Scannerless Generalised LR) technique.  A
copy of his slides is available at 
http://www.cwi.nl/pub/markvdb/cofi-slides.ps

Two versions are running, a stand-alone one and another one using the
ToolBus platform. A floppy disk with a pre-release has been
distributed to some participants.


4. Till presented a proposal for a classification of Tools annotations
in the A-term format.
A discussion pointed out several points to clarify:
-- We do not want to modify  a tool (a parser for instance)
each time a new annotation is added for another tool.
-- Some annotations are useful (even mandatory) for a specific
tool (for example grouping annotations for a parser)
but each tool must not have to handle the whole set of annotations.

Two views of dealing with annotations are being studied:
- in Bremen, Bernd will propose fixed locations in the abstract syntax tree 
where unspecified annotations are allowed.
- in Saarbruecken, Axel will report on experiences with introducing 
annotations into the abstract syntax tree retrieved from the source 
text, based on the experience from the development of INKA.

Moreover, Till's proposal will be completed in order to register all existing
and proposed annotations.

End of the meeting at 4pm.