News Archives 1996

23 December 1996:

Updated with announcement of Tools working meeting in Paris, 18-19 January 1997.

20 December 1996:

[Tentative Design] The official Summary of the Tentative Design of CASL, the CoFI Algebraic Specification Language, is now available. This document will be the basis for closer investigation of the tentative language design by various CoFI task groups (Semantics, Tools, Methodology, Language Design), leading to a firm CASL Design Proposal in March 1997.

26 November 1996:

[Design Proposal] The FINAL DRAFT of the Tentative Design Summary for CASL, the CoFI Algebraic Specification Language, is now available. Please read it!

Deadline for comments: Monday 9 December

A list of changes from the previous version (0.94) is in preparation, and will be sent to the cofi-language mailing list.

26 November 1996:

It has been decided that the acronym of the main CoFI language is CASL. The interpretation is still open to discussion: CoFI Algebraic Specification Language was the original idea, but some feel that `algebraic' is too much associated with purely equational specifications.

26 November 1996:

The working meetings held in Edinburgh (10-12 November) were successful in resolving the major remaining issues (variable declarations, generic specifications, architectural specifications, compound identifiers). Some minor adjustments were made to some other constructs.

1 November 1996:

[Language Design Notes] A revised study note on generic specifications [MB-2] has been installed.

29 October 1996:

Revised Schedule and List of Participants added to announcement of Working Meetings in Edinburgh, November 1996.

18 October 1996:

[Language Design Notes] A new study note on architectural specifications [PDM-2] has been installed.

18 October 1996:

Schedule and List of hotels added to announcement of Working Meetings in Edinburgh, November 1996.

9 October 1996:

[Tentative Design] Language Summary, version 0.93:

Deadline for comments: extended to 11 October 1996!

9 October 1996:

Updated with announcement of Working Meetings in Edinburgh, November 1996.

9 October 1996:

[Milestones] Updated.

9 October 1996:

[Participants] Updated.

9 October 1996:

[Task Groups] Coordinators of Tools, Methodology changed. Participants of Language Design adjusted.

9 October 1996:

[Mailing Lists] Moderators of cofi-tools, cofi-methodology updated. Archives updated (should be automatic!).

21 September 1996:

[Tentative Design] A new version of the Language Summary, version 0.93, is now available.

Deadline for comments: 7 October 1996!

26 August 1996:

[Tentative Design] A new version of the Language Summary, version 0.92, is now available.

Deadline for comments: 9 September 1996!

26 August 1996:

[Language Design Notes] A new study note on subsorting [MC+PDM-1] has been installed.

16 July 1996:

[Tentative Design] A rough summary of the Tentative CoFI Algebraic Specification Language Design is now available. Deadline for comments to be incorporated in the next version: 15 August 1996.

8 July 1996:

The working meeting in Munich, 5-7 July, was well attended, and reached agreement on many issues. A few technical questions remain to be resolved, and are being addressed by those of us attending the Dagstuhl seminar this week.

8 July 1996:

[Tentative Design] The previously available design description and related notes are now (partly) obsolete, so the links to them have been removed. Every effort will be made to provide a summary of the tentative common language design by 15 July! It will be announced on the cofi-language mailing list when ready.

27 June 1996:

The final announcement of the working meeting in Munich, 5-7 July, is now available, providing full details of local arrangements (including group train bookings from Munich to Saarbrücken on 7 July).

24 June 1996:

[Tentative Design] A note about basic concepts and constructs and A note about structuring concepts are now available as HTML for browsing on WWW.

21 June 1996:

[MailingLists] Access to the archives of the CoFI mailing lists has been made easier (using MHonArc to map mailboxes to HTML). A direct link from the Tentative Design Proposal to the archives of the cofi-language list has now been provided.

20 June 1996:

[Tentative Design] At last: as just announced on cofi-list, the Tentative Design Proposal to be discussed by the Language Design Task Group at its meeting in Munich is now available, together with a couple of new and updated study notes. COMMENTS ARE MOST WELCOME! - send them to the cofi-language mailing list.

11 June 1996:

The second announcement of the working meeting in Munich, 5-7 July, is available, providing details of local arrangements (including group train bookings from Munich to Saarbrücken on 7 July).

14 May 1996:

[Language Design Notes] The pages for Study Notes have been reformatted. The Postscript archives on FTP are now bit-mapped, to reduce the size (by a factor of 10).

14 May 1996:

[Catalogue of Existing Frameworks] The pages for the Catalogue have been reformatted. The Postscript archives on FTP are now bit-mapped, to reduce the size (by a factor of 10).

12 May 1996:

The WWW pages are being updated to use CoFI instead of CFI in all addresses. The old URLs involving CFI should remain valid until the end of 1996. Please inform me about any problems with invalid links or URLs.

12 May 1996:

[MailingLists] The names of the `unif' mailing lists have been changed to have the prefix `cofi', and unabbreviated suffixes! Messages sent to the old lists will be forwarded to the new ones, with a reminder of the changes.

It makes no difference whether one uses the site address `brics.dk' or `daimi.aau.dk' in Internet addresses (e-mail, WWW, FTP).

The archives of the mailing lists have been separated (where necessary :-) into 1995 and 1996 messages. An HTML-based archives browser should be installed in the near future, to facilitate browsing of the mail archives.

7 May 1996:

[Milestones] Following the Oxford meeting in March, the Milestones have been adjusted.

7 May 1996:

The CoFI meeting adjacent to AMAST'96 is now a working meeting for participants of the Language Design task group. No date has been set for the next plenary CoFI meeting (it will probably be held adjacent to the next WADT, in Spring 1997).

7 May 1996:

The acronym of the Common Frameowrk Initiative has been changed to CoFI (from CFI, which was already in use by the `CAD Framework Initiative', CFI).

12 Mar 96:

Peter Mosses is about to leave for England. No more changes will be made to the CFI WWW pages and FTP archives before the Oxfod meetings start! Participants of the Language Design Task Group meeting in Oxford should please check that they have up-to-date copies of all the study notes, and bring these with them.

12 Mar 96:

[Language Design Notes] Revised versions of [DTS+RG-1], [MB-1] (now with DTS as a co-author), and [EA+GR-1] (replacing also [EA+GR-3]). New: [MW-1], [BKB-4], [BKB+AH-1].

12 Mar 96:

List of registered participants for CFI meetings in Oxford updated.

10 Mar 96:

The way that URLs are formatted in the printed version of the CFI WWW pages has been changed to be consistent with that in the Study Notes.

10 Mar 96:

The CFI acronym has to be changed!

10 Mar 96:

[Language Design Notes] Links to individual FTP files added on Index page.

9 Mar 96:

[Paris] Due to an error at Aarhus, the mirror at Paris hadn't been updated. The procedure has now been automated. Kindly inform PDM if you can see that the mirror hasn't been updated properly.

9 Mar 96:

[Language Design Notes] New: [DTS+RG-1], [DB-1]. New at Aarhus: [DTS+AT-2].

8 Mar 96:

The WADT planned for Swansea in September 1996 has now been CANCELLED! The IFIP WG14.3 and CFI meetings that were to be held adjacent to it will therefore have to be moved to another location, and (probably) postponed.

7 Mar 96:

[Language Design Notes] New: MB-1.

4 Mar 96:

[Frameworks] Link to Z Standardization documents added.

4 Mar 96:

Michel Bidoit has established a mirror of the CFI WWW pages in Paris (updated each night). You may find this useful if you suffer from a slow net connection to Aarhus.

4 Mar 96:

[Language Design Notes] Updated: AH+FN-1. New at Aarhus: DTS+AT-1, LoeckxEhrichWolf96CH9-10 (both FTP only).

14 Feb 96:

Registered participation for Oxford meetings.

14 Feb 96:

[Software Packages] Link to the Reasoning Systems home page added.

14 Feb 96:

URGENT! Registration for Oxford meetings, deadline is 19 February!

9 Feb 96:

[Downloading] All the CFI WWW pages (including the Catalogue and Study Notes) are now available for downloading by FTP. By installing a local copy, you can avoid all delays due to net transmission times - this is especially useful in the case of the Catalogue, which is almost 10Mb of HTML code (but only about 900kb when compressed for FTP) and doesn't change so frequently as the other pages (which are in any case much smaller).

9 Feb 96:

Major changes to WWW links. Please let me know if any problems have arisen!

9 Feb 96:

[Language Design Notes] Major changes to WWW links. Please let me know if any problems have arisen!

7 Feb 96:

[Catalogue of Existing Frameworks] Major changes to WWW links. Please let me know if any problems have arisen!

1 Feb 96:

[Catalogue of Existing Frameworks] Added LSL (Larch Shared Language).
Added ACT-ONE+TWO (previously only available by FTP).
Minor change to formatting of WWW links.

31 Jan 96:

[Organizations and Projects] EAPLS Home Page added.

23 Jan 96:

[Language Design Notes] Some of the labels of the study notes have been changed! The affected ones are: BKB-1 (now BKB+DTS-1); BKB-2 (now BKB+DTS-2); EA+GR+DS-1 (now EA+GR-1); EA+GR+DS+AT-1 (now EA+GR-2); and EA+GR-1 (now EA+GR-3). Sorry for the inconvenience...

23 Jan 96:

[Language Design Notes] New study notes on Constraints [EA+AH+GR-1], Programs and Specifications [EA+GR+DS-1], Modules [GR-1], Development Process Methodology [EA+GR+DS+AT-1], and 3-tiered Approach [EA+GR-1] are now available, as well as a full table of contents.

23 Jan 96:

[Language Design Notes] New study notes on 3-Valued Logic [OO-1] and Constraints [EA+AH+GR-1] are now available. More will be installed this afternoon; watch this space!

22 Jan 96:

[Language Design Notes] A new study note [RG-1] from the Language Design task group and pointers to 2 new notes from the Methodology task group are now available.

22 Jan 96:

Updated with final details for Tools and Language Design task group meetings in Munich 27-28 January 1996.

19 Jan 96:

[Language Design Notes] Four new study notes [OJD+AH+BKB-1, BKB-1, BKB-2, BKB-3] from the Language Design task group are now available by WWW or FTP.

16 Jan 96:

[Catalogue of Existing Frameworks] Full WWW version of CFI Catalogue announced on unif-lang.

15 Jan 96:

The CFI home pages have new net addresses! BRICS (the centre for Basic Research in Computer Science at the Universities of Aarhus and Aalborg in Denmark) now has its own domain, `brics.dk'. I've taken the opportunity to rationalize the address of the CFI home page, so that `~pdm' no longer appears. The new WWW and FTP addresses are:

URL: http://www.brics.dk/Projects/CFI
URL: ftp://ftp.brics.dk/pub/BRICS/Projects/CFI

If you have copies of any style files that define the commands \wwwCFI or \ftpCFI, kindly get fresh copies, as these have been updated. Moreover, please note that my own mail address is now pdmosses@brics.dk. For the UNIF-* mailing lists, it shouldn't make any difference whether messages are sent to the list at daimi.aau.dk or brics.dk.

All the old addresses should remain valid for the rest of 1996.

11 Jan 96:

Miscellaneous minor updates. Planning to release full WWW version of CFI Catalogue 12 Jan 96. (The version there now is currently being checked by the authors.)

2 Jan 96:

[Language Design Study Notes] The first study note: about "How to write CFI Language Design Study Notes" making use of "Patterns". (This just provides the same link as given in the message sent on the unif-lang mailing-list today.)