Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Newsletter

Issue 19 - 20th March 1995

Editor - Hugh Glaser

Contents:

Editorial
Today's Seminar
OPERA - Vicki Sivess
Prograph Lunch
Trip Report - Hugh Glaser
HPCC Seminar

Editorial

More good news. Further to last week's article about Pieter Hartel, I am delighted to report that Michael Butler (who gave that excellent seminar on refinement) has been offered a Lecturship in the Department. He has indicated that he will accept, starting later this year.

And yet more delight. Stewart Maclean has accepted the research post on the GraphIcsla project . He will start on 1st April.

Trevor Smedley arrives today, for three weeks.

Department awayday on Friday, so academic staff at Chilworth.

Today's Seminar

The following seminar will be at 1:00 on Monday 20th March in ES1 (note venue).
Visual Languages for the Design and Development of Structured Objects
Dr Trevor Smedley
Technical University of Nova Scotia

Abstract

The design of abstract or physical structures has much in common with the design of software structures, particularly when the structure in question has a mechanical or computational behaviour, such as a digital circuit. Like programming language systems, design systems must have expressive power sufficient for representing any design, a simulation mechanism for debugging the artifact under construction, and a production mechanism; for example, compilation for a programming language, or chip fabrication for a VLSI design system.

Since specifying complex devices requires repetitive and conditional structures analogous to iteration, recursion and conditionals in programs, languages for designing complex devices are usually based on textual programming languages, for example VHDL for VLSI design. The advent of full-featured visual programming languages, however, raises the possibility we consider here: that mechanisms used to visually express compact and powerful program structures could be generalised to design languages.

OPERA - Vicki Sivess

We have now heard officially that our bid to carry out part of the work on the Eureka OPERA (Open PCTE for Environments, Repositories and Applications) project, led by ICL, has been accepted. Stephen Hellberg, who currently works on the PPPE project will be working on the project from April 1st to the end of the year. He will be moving into the DSSE group, and will bring to the project his experience of tool integration using PCTE.

Prograph Lunch

Prographers meet at 1pm in the MB Common Room for Beer and Pizza.

Trip Report - Hugh Glaser

I spent Tuesday and a bit of Wednesday at a meeting of the EPSRC's PPECC (Parallel Processing in Engineering Community Club) at Cosener's House in Abingdon. The topic was "Parallel and Distributed: Convergence or Divergence?".

Generally interesting (espcially Denis' talk?!); I have the position papers for those who want a read. It was one of those meetings where the EPSRC is actually inviting the "research community" to tell them how to spend money. I missed the conclusion (I had a lecture in Southampton), but Denis knows a bit more.

One snippet: the responsive mode has meant that they are less than inundated with application.

Cosener's House is very comfortable, but they do fill up the wine glasses a bit frequently!

HPCC Course

Message Passing with MPI and PVM
23rd March 1995, 09.00am to 5.00pm


Copy deadline: 5pm Friday for Monday's newsletter, but send the articles any time.

Hugh Glaser
Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton