Subject: Re: hello from France
From: Craig Chambers (chambers@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 10:42:53 PDT
Great to hear from you, Vass. I'm glad your settling in nicely. Keep
us informed about any ideas or insights you gain, and we'll do likewise.
-- Craig
On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Vassily wrote:
> Bonjour everyone!
>
> Executive summary:
> - spent a week with my family in Moscow;
> - got settled in INRIA; see end for contact info
> - giving a presentation on my work this Friday,
> planning to discuss informally Craig's EML with Didier;
> my project to be determined by early next week
> - attended PhD defence of Jerome Vouillon and talks by
> Benjamin Pierce and Martin Odersky
> - talked to Didier-student (working on OCaml's type system)
> and Daniel-student (working on Nice - concrete and better ML-sub)
> For a longer literary exercise, read on.
>
> Writing you from Rocquencourt, a small place near Versailles (and
> that's a big place near Paris!). After having spent a week in Moscow,
> visited a bunch of relatives and performed the agrarian duty, I am now
> adjusting to being in this very different place and working with
> people with surprisingly similar interests and views - the research
> team of Didier Remy and the birthplace of OCaml - the Cristal
> Project at INRIA.
>
> In my first week (or, rather, half-week) I attended the PhD defence of
> Jerome Vouillon (the implementer of the "O" in OCaml). He is
> apparently very bright (and BTW the first place at this year's ICFP
> programming competition, in a team with a couple of other guys at
> UPenn), but his answers to the questions of his PhD committee were
> very concise - of a yes/no kind. The questions themselves were much
> longer and sounded like masterpieces in themselves, containing a good
> deal of humor, so I was rather disappopinted to hear only short
> answers by Jerome. (Well, almost everything was in French so I
> couldn't follow anyway.) Anyway, that didn't affect the outcome of
> the defense.
>
> I also attended the talks of Benjamin Pierce (on his work of defining
> and implementing a robust file synchronisation protocol) and Martin
> Odersky (on his development of Java-compatible concurrent language).
> Benjamin and Martin turned out to be on Jerome's PhD committee so they
> gave talks while they were here.
>
> Last week I discussed my work and theirs with a couple of students.
> (Here they have students named Didier, Benjamin, etc., so some
> confusion may arise.) Didier Le Botlan is trying to add higher-order
> quantification to OCaml (i.e., to be able to parameterize over type
> constructors, not just over types). Allegedly this should be
> straightforward.
>
> Daniel Bonniot is working on an out-growth of ML-sub. He was the
> student of Francois Bourdoncle, but Francois quit research in favor a
> start-up in the area of building - you would never guess - a web
> search engine. So Daniel found a solution in becoming a student of
> Didier Remy. Daniel is working on increasing the expressive power of
> ML-sub, while at the same time implementing it in a language with a
> Java syntax called "Nice" (former Jazz?) (one of his aspirations is to
> make any legal Java program also a legal program in Nice with the same
> meaning. Hmmm...). On my todo list is talking to Francois Pottier
> who is working on type inference with subtyping.
>
> Finally, installed Vortex here - everything went incredibly smoothly.
> Complements go to Craig and others for spending enormous amount of
> time getting the bugs out of the installation process. Now only need
> to find a g++ library (to get the linker's -lg++ option satisfied).
> But the pre-compiled Vortex runs as-is, which is good enough for the
> typechecker.
>
> Contact info - I will be using my usual email address. Other than that:
>
> Vassily Litvinov
> INRIA Rocquencourt
> Projet Cristal
> Domaine de Voluceau
> B.P. 105
> 78153 Le Chesnay
> FRANCE
>
> Office phone: +33-1-3963-5139
> Home phone - don't have
> Email: vass@cs.washington.edu
>
> Cheers,
> Vass
>
>
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