Mercury Meeting Today, Tuesday 25th August, 5pm.

[Tyson Dowd]

This weeks Mercury meeting will be held in the 3rd floor tearoom
at 5pm.  That's tonight -- apologies for the lateness of this notice.

Mark Brown will be speaking on the topic of "The Box Model"
for about half an hour.  Here's his description of the talk:

	The Box Model (or four-port model) for Prolog was introduced in
	1980 by Lawrence Byrd.  His intention was to use this as a
	learning device for novices, as well as a framework for
	debuggers.  Since then the model has been extended to a) cover
	more aspects of Prolog execution; and b) be closer to a formal
	specification of Prolog debuggers.

	I will present a Box Model for Mercury, based on Byrd's original
	work, and show how the extensions for Prolog can be used in this
	new model.  In addition, the Mercury system has access to a lot
	more information, such as determinism, that can usefully be
	associated to objects in the model.  On the other hand,
	structures in earlier models designed to handle non-logical
	features of Prolog can be omitted.

	I believe this model can be used as a learning device for
	novices, as a formal specification of the tracing subsystem of
	mmc, and as a framework within which to prove correctness of
	(parts of) the execution algorithm.  The talk will finish with a
	general discussion of these three applications.

This will be followed by an informal discussion of Mercury related
topics, and will conclude with an outing to dinner for those who are
hungry.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # There isn't any reason why Linux can't be
                            # implemented as an enterprise computing solution.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # Find out what you've been missing while you've
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd # been rebooting Windows NT. -- InfoWorld, 1998.