From honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!noc.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!ub!csn!boulder!wraeththu.cs.colorado.edu!tchrist Mon Sep 13 16:23:29 EDT 1993 Article: 7423 of comp.lang.scheme Xref: honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu comp.org.usenix:4384 comp.org.sug:978 comp.unix.programmer:13237 comp.unix.shell:12577 comp.lang.misc:14351 comp.lang.icon:2267 comp.lang.perl:20206 comp.lang.postscript:20444 comp.lang.rexx:4524 comp.lang.scheme:7423 comp.lang.smalltalk:9041 comp.lang.tcl:6918 alt.lang.awk:459 alt.lang.basic:2320 Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix,comp.org.sug,comp.unix.programmer,comp.unix.shell,comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.icon,comp.lang.perl,comp.lang.postscript,comp.lang.rexx,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.tcl,alt.lang.awk,alt.lang.basic Path: honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!noc.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!ub!csn!boulder!wraeththu.cs.colorado.edu!tchrist From: tchrist@wraeththu.cs.colorado.edu (Tom Christiansen) Subject: Call for Participation: USENIX SYMPOSIUM ON VERY HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES Message-ID: <1993Sep12.144240.23999@colorado.edu> Followup-To: comp.org.usenix,comp.lang.misc Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet) Nntp-Posting-Host: wraeththu.cs.colorado.edu Organization: Usenix Association Office, Berkeley CA Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1993 14:42:40 GMT Lines: 145 USENIX SYMPOSIUM ON VERY HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES (VHLL) October 26-28, 1994 El Dorado Hotel Santa Fe, New Mexico DATES FOR REFEREED PAPER SUBMISSIONS: Extended Abstracts Due: June 30, 1994 Notifications to Authors: July 27, 1994 Final Papers Due: Sept 12, 1994 REGISTRATION MATERIALS AVAILABLE: August, 1994 PROGRAM COMMITTEE Program Chair: Tom Christiansen, Consultant Stephen C. Johnson, Melismatic Software Brian Kernighan, AT&T Bell Laboratories John Ousterhout, University of California, Berkeley Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Using very high level languages (VHLLs), programmers can assemble entire applications from large building blocks in just a small fraction of the time required if conventional programming strategies were used. These languages allow programmers to take advantage of increasingly available hardware cycles, trading cheap machine time for costly programmer time. Thus, VHLLs offer one of the most promising approaches toward radically improving programmer productivity. UNIX has long supported very high level languages: consider awk and the various shells. Often programmers create what are essentially new little languages whenever a problem appears of sufficient complexity to merit a higher level programming interface -- consider sendmail.cf. In recent years many UNIX programmers have been turning to VHLLs for both rapid prototypes and complete applications. They take advantage of these languages' higher level of abstraction to complete projects more rapidly and more easily than they could have using lower-level languages. Some VHLLs such as TCL, Perl, Icon, and REXX have gained widespread use and popularity. Many others never see the public light. Some of these languages are special purpose, addressing a limited-problem domain (such as graphics, text processing, or mathematical modeling) using powerful primitives created for that specific problem. Other VHLLs are more general purpose in nature, but still much higher level than most traditional compiled languages. Some are stand-alone languages, while others are designed to be embedded in other programs. Many are interpreted, although some are compiled to native machine code; a few occupy a gap between both worlds. SYMPOSIUM SCOPE AND FORMAT The USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages will spotlight these languages and their usefulness in leveraging certain kinds of tasks. The Symposium will introduce participants to concepts and approaches they haven't examined yet, and publish original work in these areas. Programmers will learn about the relative strengths and weaknesses and extract the key concepts that run through the various languages presented. The USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages will run three days: * Wednesday, October 26, will feature hour-long overviews by invited speakers of some of the more popular VHLLs in use today, such as TCL, Perl, Icon, and REXX. * Thursday and Friday, October 27-28, will consist of refereed papers, tutorial-style invited talks on related topics, and panel discussions. * Birds-of-a-Feather sessions will be held Wednesday and Thursday evenings, and a Reception will be held Thursday evening. Papers on brand-new languages, on existing languages about which little or nothing has been published, on applications that use these languages in creative fashions not yet seen, and on experiences at extending existing languages (for example, adding windowing capabilities to awk) are all welcome. Papers should address designing, building, testing, debugging, and measuring the performance and usability of these languages, as well as reference and compare related work in the area. Mention both advantages and disadvantages of the approach selected. For applications using these languages, compare and contrast the design, development, and support effort that were required with this approach versus one using a lower-level language. Good papers will be of interest to people who use other VHLLs than the one described in the paper. For example, a paper describing a system built in a particular language will be much more interesting if it highlights some important feature of the language or problems with the language, or some issue relevant to VHLLs in general. HOW TO SUBMIT TO THE SYMPOSIUM: Persons interested in participating in panel discussions or organizing Birds-of-a-Feather sessions should contact the program chair as indicated below. Submissions of papers to be presented at the Symposium and published in the Symposium Proceedings must be in the form of an extended abstract. The extended abstract should be1500-2500 words (3-5 pages) and must be received by June 30, 1994. (If you do send a full paper, you must also include an extended abstract for evaluation.) The extended abstract should represent your paper in short form. Its purpose is to convince the program committee that a good paper and presentation will result. You should show that you are addressing an interesting problem, have surveyed existing solutions, have devised an innovative, original solution, and have drawn appropriate conclusions about what has been learned. All submissions should indicate the electronic mail address and telephone number of a principal contact. Authors will be notified of acceptance by July 27, 1994, and will be provided with guidelines for preparing camera-ready copy of the final paper. The final paper must be received no later than September 12, 1994. Note that the USENIX conference, like most conferences and journals, considers it unethical to submit the same paper simultaneously to more than one conference or publication or to submit a paper that has been or will be published elsewhere. Please submit your extended abstracts to the program chair as follows. EMAILED SUBMISSIONS (PREFERRED): must be in ASCII, troff (with the -me macro set or raw troff preferred), or Postscript form; send to tchrist@usenix.org HARD COPY SUBMISSIONS: * via FAX to +1 (303) 442-7177 (Please refer to Tom Christiansen) * via postal mail, please submit 6 paper copies to: Tom Christiansen USENIX VHLL Symposium 2227 Canyon Blvd, #262 Boulder CO 80302 FOR PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION INFORMATION: Materials containing full details of the symposium program, registration fees and forms, and hotel discount and reservation information will be mailed and posted to the net in August 1994. If you wish to receive these materials, please contact: USENIX Conference Office 22672 Lambert Street, Suite 613 Lake Forest, CA USA 92630 +1 (714) 588-8649; FAX: +1 (714) 588-9706 Internet: conference@usenix.org -- Tom Christiansen tchrist@cs.colorado.edu 303-444-3212