Synopses & Reviews
This volume contains the papers presented at the latest Glasgow Workshop on Functional Programming, held in Portree on the Isle of Skye, 12-14 August 1991. These workshops have been held annually by the Glasgow Functional Programming group since 1988 and provide a valuable forum for members of the group and invited contributors from industry and other institutions to discuss current research work. The 29 papers contained in this volume, many of which have been rewritten since the original presentation, deal with both the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of functional programming, each paper summarising the central issues of its subject area. A variety of themes emerged from the workshop, including relational algebra and its application to hardware design, partial evaluation and program transformation, implementation techniques, and strictness analysis. Among the specific areas covered in this volume are: a new sharing mechanism for the TIM; evaluation order analysis for lazy data structures; extending deforestation for first order functional programs; a semantics for relational programming; abstractions in Ruby; and operational theories of improvement in functional languages. Functional Programming, Glasgow 1991 provides a comprehensive overview of current research in this field and will be of interest to anyone involved in the theory of functional programming or its application to practical problems.
Synopsis
The Glasgow functional programming group has held a workshop each summer since 1988. The entire group, accompanied by a selection of colleagues from other institutions, retreats to a pleasant Scottish location for a few days. Everyone speaks briefly, enhancing coherence, cross- fertilisation, and camaraderie in our work. The proceedings of the first workshop were published as a technical report. Demand for this was large enough to encourage wider publication, and subsequent proceedings have been published in the Springer-Verlag Workshops in Computing series. These are the proceedings of the-meeting held 12-14 August 1991, in Portree on the Isle of Skye. A preliminary proceedings was prepared in advance of the meeting. Most presentations were limited to a brief fifteen minutes, outlining the essentials of their subject, and referring the audience to the pre-print proceedings for details. Papers were then refereed and rewritten, and you hold the final results in your hands. A number of themes emerged at this year's workshop, including relational algebra and its application to hardware design, partial evaluation and program transformation, implementation techniques, and strictness analysis. We were especially pleased to see applications of functional programming emerge as a theme. One of the sessions was devoted to a lively discussion of applications, and was greatly enhanced by our industrial participants. The workshop was organised by Kei Davis, Cordelia Hall, Rogardt Heldal, Carsten Kehler Holst, John Hughes, John O'Donnell, and Satnam Singh all from the University of Glasgow.