CFP: USENIX SYMPOSIUM ON VERY HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES (Santa Fe, Oct 94)

USENIX SYMPOSIUM ON VERY HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES (VHLL)
October 26-28, 1994
El Dorado Hotel
Santa Fe, New Mexico




DATES FOR REFEREED PAPER SUBMISSIONS:
        Extended Abstracts Due: June 30, 1994
        Notifications to Authors: July 27, 1994
        Final Papers Due: Sept 12, 1994


REGISTRATION MATERIALS AVAILABLE: August, 1994


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
        Program Chair: Tom Christiansen, Consultant
        Stephen C. Johnson, Melismatic Software
        Brian Kernighan, AT&T Bell Laboratories
        John Ousterhout, University of California, Berkeley
        Henry Spencer, University of Toronto


Using very high level languages (VHLLs), programmers can assemble entire
applications from large building blocks in just a small fraction of the
time required if conventional programming strategies were used. These
languages allow programmers to take advantage of increasingly available
hardware cycles, trading cheap machine time for costly programmer time.
Thus, VHLLs offer one of the most promising approaches toward radically
improving programmer productivity.


UNIX has long supported very high level languages: consider awk and the
various shells. Often programmers create what are essentially new little
languages whenever a problem appears of sufficient complexity to merit a
higher level programming interface -- consider sendmail.cf. In recent
years many UNIX programmers have been turning to VHLLs for both rapid
prototypes and complete applications. They take advantage of these
languages' higher level of abstraction to complete projects more rapidly
and more easily than they could have using lower-level languages.


Some VHLLs such as TCL, Perl, Icon, and REXX have gained widespread use
and popularity. Many others never see the public light. Some of these
languages are special purpose, addressing a limited-problem domain (such
as graphics, text processing, or mathematical modeling) using powerful
primitives created for that specific problem. Other VHLLs are more
general purpose in nature, but still much higher level than most
traditional compiled languages. Some are stand-alone languages, while
others are designed to be embedded in other programs. Many are
interpreted, although some are compiled to native machine code; a few
occupy a gap between both worlds.


SYMPOSIUM SCOPE AND FORMAT


The USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages will spotlight these
languages and their usefulness in leveraging certain kinds of tasks. The
Symposium will introduce participants to concepts and approaches they
haven't examined yet, and publish original work in these areas.
Programmers will learn about the relative strengths and weaknesses and
extract the key concepts that run through the various languages
presented.


The USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages will run three days:


* Wednesday, October 26, will feature hour-long overviews by invited
    speakers of some of the more popular VHLLs in use today, such as TCL,
    Perl, Icon, and REXX.


* Thursday and Friday, October 27-28, will consist of refereed papers,
    tutorial-style invited talks on related topics, and panel discussions.


* Birds-of-a-Feather sessions will be held Wednesday and Thursday
    evenings, and a Reception will be held Thursday evening.


Papers on brand-new languages, on existing languages about which little or
nothing has been published, on applications that use these languages in
creative fashions not yet seen, and on experiences at extending existing
languages (for example, adding windowing capabilities to awk) are all
welcome. Papers should address designing, building, testing, debugging,
and measuring the performance and usability of these languages, as well as
reference and compare related work in the area. Mention both advantages
and disadvantages of the approach selected. For applications using these
languages, compare and contrast the design, development, and support
effort that were required with this approach versus one using a
lower-level language. Good papers will be of interest to people who use
other VHLLs than the one described in the paper. For example, a paper
describing a system built in a particular language will be much more
interesting if it highlights some important feature of the language or
problems with the language, or some issue relevant to VHLLs in general.


HOW TO SUBMIT TO THE SYMPOSIUM:


Persons interested in participating in panel discussions or organizing
Birds-of-a-Feather sessions should contact the program chair as indicated
below.


Submissions of papers to be presented at the Symposium and published in
the Symposium Proceedings must be in the form of an extended abstract.
The extended abstract should be1500-2500 words (3-5 pages) and must be
received by June 30, 1994. (If you do send a full paper, you must also
include an extended abstract for evaluation.) The extended abstract
should represent your paper in short form. Its purpose is to convince the
program committee that a good paper and presentation will result. You
should show that you are addressing an interesting problem, have surveyed
existing solutions, have devised an innovative, original solution, and
have drawn appropriate conclusions about what has been learned.


All submissions should indicate the electronic mail address and telephone
number of a principal contact. Authors will be notified of acceptance by
July 27, 1994, and will be provided with guidelines for preparing
camera-ready copy of the final paper. The final paper must be received no
later than September 12, 1994. Note that the USENIX conference, like most
conferences and journals, considers it unethical to submit the same paper
simultaneously to more than one conference or publication or to submit a
paper that has been or will be published elsewhere.


Please submit your extended abstracts to the program chair as follows.


EMAILED SUBMISSIONS (PREFERRED):
must be in ASCII, troff (with the -me macro set or raw troff preferred), or
Postscript form; send to tchrist@usenix.org


HARD COPY SUBMISSIONS:


* via FAX to +1 (303) 442-7177 (Please refer to Tom Christiansen)
* via postal mail, please submit 6 paper copies to:
        Tom Christiansen
        USENIX VHLL Symposium
        2227 Canyon Blvd, #262
        Boulder CO 80302




FOR PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION INFORMATION:


Materials containing full details of the symposium program, registration
fees and forms, and hotel discount and reservation information will be
mailed and posted to the net in August 1994. If you wish to receive these
materials, please contact:


        USENIX Conference Office
        22672 Lambert Street, Suite 613
        Lake Forest, CA USA 92630
        +1 (714) 588-8649; FAX: +1 (714) 588-9706
        Internet: conference@usenix.org




--
        Tom Christiansen tchrist@cs.colorado.edu 303-444-3212
--

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