This 2nd AMAST digest collects the comments received between 30.07.94 and 15.08.94 on the proposal for a new, permanent AMAST list. The comments are presented in the chronological order of their arrival. This digest is distributed to the subscribers of the list amast@cs.utwente.nl, as well as to those who asked for it by a request to amast-info@cs.utwente.nl. I look forward to receiving further comments; if you have some, please send them to the following address: amast@cs.utwente.nl They will be included in the next digest, expected to be distributed in two weeks from now. Best regards, Pippo ______________________ STATISTICS -- 15.08.94 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The current statistics about subscriptions and no. of people contributing comments are as follows: (A) 34 contributed comments (6 twice), (B) 170 subscribed, (C) 8 sent a request to amast-info, without subscribing as yet, (D) 18 unsubscribed explicitly. [beginning of 2nd AMAST Digest] =============================================== IN REPLY TO SAMPLE ISSUE 00 AND FIRST DIGEST OF COMMENTS: ____________ T.B. Dinesh: > vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv > \ / > ) AMAST Newsletter, Sample Issue 00 ( > / \ > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Looks good. Although I would put AMAST related stuff (contents) first. ____________ Laks V.S. Lakshmanan: I do like the idea of a separate newsletter, and its form as in the sample you sent me. The only observation I have is I have found the model of the LICS newsletter very effective, in the sense that all news articles are usually quite crisp, with enough info for the reader to decide whether (s)he would be interested in going after the story further, and with pointers to where to get the details from. This has proved very useful without consuming a lot of time. Perhaps for the amast newsletter, we could adopt a simila approach. E.g., in place of complete CFPs, a few lines would be posted giving the essentials and pointers. In this connection, I liked the suggestions from a couple of amasters that (i) only short news items in a "table of contents" style be posted in the newsletter with pointers say to WWW saying where to get the details, and (ii) that there is no need to worry too much about the availability of WWW on account of the widely accessible NCSA Mosaic. ____________ Jiawei Han: The newsletter and mails are interesting. ____________ Prakash Panangaden: The newsletter is beautiful. ____________ IN REPLY TO SAMPLE ISSUE 01: ____________ Jawei Han: The contents of the newsletter are rich and interesting. ____________ Vaughan Pratt: Looks a lot bigger. ____________ Teodor Rus: The letter looks great! I like it, it is informative, short and complete. ____________ V.S. Alagar: It is an excellent move to consolidate the amast mailing lists and to start a newsletter. I may add that the newsletter should provide pointers rather than details of events, and should include abstracts. The frequency of the newsletter can be once every two weeks or as demanded by the amount of information. All newsletters should be available at a central site, so that at any future date any member of AMAST could access them and make copies. I find the COLIBRI format quite acceptable. It is better to coordinate with the SIGALA group - perhaps two different newsletters can exist with ample coordination of efforts & activities. ____________ David L. Parnas: I like the format, especially the table of contents. ____________ Martin Bate: I was impressed. It's well put together and the regular digest is definitely a better format than a mailing list. ____________ Frits Vaandrager: I find your newsletters too long. It is unpleasant to scroll pages of announcements of a conference in which one is not interested through ones screen in order to get to something that one would like to see. Due to ftp and www there is no longer a need to send long announcements via email: a 10 line abstract should suffice. As an example of what I think is a good newsletter, I have attached below [a fragment of] one of the LICS newsletters. ------------------------------------------------------------------ From: "daniel leivant" Subject: LICS newsletter 8 To: lics-email@cs.indiana.edu Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1993 22:22:47 -0500 (EST) ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF FUNCTIONAL & LOGIC PROGRAMMING (EJFLP) Fully refereed and available via email free of charge. First issue expected in late 1993. Editorial Board: R. Loogen, H. Kuchen, M. Hanus, M. MT Chakravarty, M. Koehler, Y. Guo, M. Rodriguez-Artalejo, A. Krall, A. Mueck, T. Ida, HCR. Lock, A. Hallmann, P. Padawitz, C. Brzoska, F. Pfennig Papers sollicited in: functional and logic languages; integration of programming paradigms; parallelism in functional & logic programming; program interpretation, compilation & transformation; static analysis; semantic foundations; proof calculis for for functional, logic, & constraint programming; applications; declarative programming concepts & methodolgy Papers of any length should be submitted in postscript or dvi format to submissions@ls5.informatik.uni-dortmund.de. Email an empty message with "Help" in subject field for submission info. Deadline for submissions to issue #1 is August 31. Subsciptions: send an empty message to subscriptions@ls5.informatik.uni-dortmund.de 21ST ACM SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES (POPL) Portland, Oregon, January 16--19, 1994 Submit 14 copies of a technical summary, not to exceed 5000 words (excluding bibliography and figures) by July 26 to the Program Cair, Hans-J. Boehm, Xerox Palo Alto Research Ctr, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA. boehm@parc.xerox.com Specific suggestions for writing summaries are available for anonymous ftp as file "suggestions" in the directories parcftp.xerox.com:pub/popl94 and ftp.inria.fr:INRIA/publication/ChLoE/SIGPLAN/popl94 General Chairs: B. Lang, D. Yellin. Arrangement Chair: T. Sheard Program Committee: B. Ballance, G. Berry, H.-J. Boehm, L. Cardelli, M. Chen, R. Farrow, J. Launchbury, P. Lee, D. Miller, W. Pugh, V. Sarkar, C. Talcott, K. Zadeck ____________ Joost-Pieter Katoen I think that most of the information is very useful to potential readers. ____________ Pippo Scollo I'm happy to see that structure and layout of the tentative AMAST newsletter find enthusiastic acceptance by some. Yet, different views remain about its length, size constraints on contributions, and style of `short' announcements. Personally, I'm rather in favour of a COLIBRI-style AMAST newsletter than of a LICS-style, for the simple reason that, in the latter style, a newsletter that serves very well the interests of the AMAST community does already exist, namely it is the LICS newsletter. I do see the point made by Frits, however. If an issue consists of three pages, then the pages one has got to skip, to get to the interesting one, don't matter in any case; if the issue consists of seven pages, then those pages are perceived as noise by some. A solution to this problem, for those who feel it, is perhaps the following. First: the e-mail distribution of the newsletter should be in two options: o `long' format, like the first two sample newsletters, o `short' format, only consisting of TOC (1st page) and ftp-update (last page, listing the newly added material only). The digest of comments (if this will be the chosen form of communication for the new list) would be replaced by an entry in the ftp-update page, for the subscribers of the `short' form. Second: individual pages of the newsletter should be given `direct access', at least in some of the forms in which the newsletter will be stored and offered for automatic retrieval. Surely in the HTML form, when/if there will be one, but maybe also in a plain text form that would support the automatic serving of requests made by e-mail (such as in typical mailbase systems). In this way, a subscriber to the `short' form might receive the pages of his or her interest by a simple e-mail reply to the message which carries the (`short') newsletter. Essentially the same question (but of special interest to those who don't subscribe and nonetheless get the newsletter and/or digest from the AMAST ftp repository) applies to granularity of the information in the ftp repository. Namely: (1) Should we keep the digest in its current form, or should we give it a finer granularity, to the limit of allowing access to individual contributions separately? (2) Should we keep the newsletter in its current form, or should we give it a finer granularity, to the limit of allowing access to individual pages separately? ____________ John Staples: Looks good Pippo - I can't think of too many ways it could be better. Maybe: include brief info for contributors at end; move a few other details to end (e.g. this issue's contributors). ____________ Yuri Gurevich: I find your proposal very reasonable. ____________ Peter Grogono: The sample newsletter looks fine. My only comment addresses your remarks on the size of announcements. I do not see the need for a restriction to a particular length, such as 40 lines. In general, however, I prefer short announcements that contain just the essential information to long announcements with abstracts of 20 tutorials etc. If I am interested in the details, I can find out what I need. For a journal announcement, such as Chicago JTCS, I think that a long announcement is justified. It is important to know the areas covered by the journal, who the editors are, etc. ____________ Pankaj Goyal: I personally think that the idea of a permanent mailing list with a periodic newsletter is a very good one. If there is something specific that you would like me to help with, please let me know. ____________ T.B. Dinesh: Looks very nice. [end of 2nd AMAST Digest] =====================================================