Functional Programming, Glasgow 1991

Book excerpt: 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.