Alfredo, On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 10:43 PM, you wrote: > Hi Bill, > > For those no so fortune to be able to travel to Europe > ( I cannot even travel in the states :-), > is there gonna be a summary some where of what it > was discussed ? or at least interesting news :) > > Maybe a video...:p...yeah I know I am asking for too much. > > Thank you, >
I am quite sorry that you and some of the other Axiom and Aldor developers and users were not able to come to the meeting. I am sure you could have provided valuable input to the discussion. Notably absent also was Tim Daly, especially since the main developers of the two other other Axiom-related projects were there (Gaby, and Waldek). Here is a fairly accurate updated schedule of the workshop prepared by the organizer of the workshop Ralf Hemmecke: http://portal.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/Members/hemmecke/aldoraxiom2008 I think that overall the organization of the workshop was very good - much thanks to Ralf! And in spite of often being arranged at the "last minute", the talks and discussions actually fit together into a quite coherently whole. But sorry, there was no video or audio recording. :-( In my opinion this is something that we need to try harder to do in the future. One very good thing that was done this year for the first time was to combine both the Aldor and Axiom workshops into one. This meant that Stephen Watt and a few other people were present specifically because of Aldor and vice-versa. This was good for two reasons: Stephen of course was deeply involved in the development of ScratchPad before it became Axiom and the main developer of Aldor so he was able to offer a lot of important background on both projects. Secondly I think it helped strengthen the argument that Aldor should have a more open open-source license because of the amount of development work occurring in the Axiom forks in comparison to Aldor. At the main ISSAC meeting which occurred just before the workshop William Stein, the main developer of Sage, emphasized exactly the same issue. Besides many technical discussions on language design, comparing developments in SPAD (especially in OpenAxiom) and Aldor, there was at least some small progress towards a more open license. One reason for this is the work being done by Ralf Hemmecke and Peter Broadbery on the Aldor-Axiom interface. There a few runtime-related files in the Aldor distribution that are required to build the interface and everyone agrees that it would be a good thing to be able to distribute and build the Aldor-Axiom interface without having to include the Aldor sources and it's license. More information about that will follow in a few weeks I hope. For me one of the most surprising and exciting developments in the last year was that an entirely new and very active Aldor developer has appeared thanks mainly due to the ubiquity of the Internet and the still rapidly growing open source culture. Pippijn van Steenhoven discussed his work on the internals of the Aldor compiler using "state-of-the-art" tools and methods that are common in other open source projects, such as valgrind and other profiling tools. As a result of this work Pippijn has already been able to isolate and fix some important causes of segfaults that plague the Aldor compiler. You can both see (and use!) the results of his work here: http://xinutec.org/~pippijn/en/projects_aldor.xhtml Please ask more questions. It seems a bit hard for me, although it is still current, to really summarize the results of the workshop. As time permits, I will try to add more in follow-up comments. I hope some of the other people who were there will also offer their perspectives and comments here. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
