Journal on Side Effect Free Programming

[Fergus Henderson]

-----Forwarded message from Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira <costa at ufu.br>-----

Date: Fri, 05 Mar 1999 19:29:14 -0300
From: costa at ufu.br (Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira)
Organization: Universidade Federal de Uberlandia
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (WinNT; I)
To: fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Subject: Side Effect Free Programming.

Dear Sir.
I happened to read your letter to Alex Santos,
an alumni of this university. 
In that letter, you exposed
the reasons for not investing much work on 
non-professional programmers, who may show interest
in using Mercury. Nevertheless, you point out that
this attitude is due to lack of time and human
resources. Well, our group intends to publish a
journal on applications of side effect free 
programming. We intend to do professional and careful
type setting and good art work (there are many artists
among us). The journal will contain mainly tutorials
and applications, because there are other publications
where people can read on theoretical aspects of
functional and logic programs.

The new journal aims at beginners and students. We believe that,
if one wants to make side effect free programming a
popular discipline, he/she must educate young people,
and raise the interest of the amateur. 
Although you disaggree with
our point of view, we hope that you will become a
constant collaborator of our journal, both submitting
papers and serving as our editor for Mercury. The editor
is supposed to accept submissions and handle them to
the referees of his own choice. He is also supposed to
propose challenge problems to the community.

In three months, we intend to publish a pilot issue.
We would be glad if the Mercury community could prepare
a tutorial covering:

	1- Installation of Mercury. People often complain
	that Mercury and Haskell are difficult to install,
	specially on Windows. Alex, for instance, installed
	CygWin, which works with everything else (even with
	Haskell), but not with 	Mercury. When he tries to 
	run mmc, he gets a message 	saying that the system 
	could not find CygWin1.DLL. However, that DLL is there, 
	in the path of mmc,  and every  program can see it, 
	except mmc. The tutorial could address difficulties like this one.
	2- A few complete examples. The author of your choice
	should include simple examples, which pose no difficulties 
	to tyros. 
	
After the pilot issue, the journal will have a periodicity
of 3 issues every year. If you cannot collaborate with
us, due to lack of time or because you disaggree with the
philosophy of our journal, please, could you indicate another
person who may serve as editor for Mercury?

Yours sincerely.

Eduardo Costa.


-----End of forwarded message-----

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.