We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Monday, 12 November 2001.

Attendees:
	Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
	David Overton (dmo)
	Simon Taylor (stayl)
	Ralph Becket (rafe)
	Mark Brown (dougl)

Progress reports

	Ralph Becket (rafe):
		- Contining to work on the loop invariant hoisting
		  optimization and learning the necessary compiler
		  internals.
		- Started working on the tutorial book.  A new cvs
		  module `books' has been created with a subdirectory
		  called `tutorial' which has been populated with a
		  few draft text files.  Updates to this module will
		  not be reported on mercury-reviews.
		- Has been thinking about putting together a more
		  formal specification than the reference manual of
		  the core language suitable for compiler writers.
		  The idea has received support from the group;
		  hopefully a good deal of the document can be culled
		  near directly from local dissertations.

	David Overton (dmo):
		- Has been working on the mode constraints paper.
		- Has been working on formalizing mode declaration
		  checking.
		- Has not had time to work on implementation this
		  week.

	Mark Brown (dougl):
		- Has been working on getting the debugger retry
		  mechanism to work for all IL types with the .NET
		  back end.
		- Has set up an automated testing system to support
		  the above work.

	Zoltan Somogyi (zs):
		- Has finished debugging the stack slot optimization
		  and obtained some speed-ups.  Performance tests were
		  still running during the meeting (seven versions of
		  the compiler with each of -O2 ... -O5!)  Some
		  results have shown a 1.3% speed up and others have
		  shown a 7% reduction in stack frame size.  Zoltan
		  reported that the optimization was not too costly in
		  terms of compilation time.
		- Has been working on the stack slot optimization
		  paper which is due in this Friday.
		- Reports that six summer students will be joining the
		  team, but not including Simon Mei who was with us last year.
		  It was suggested that once they are all here
		  together we give them the one-day introduction to
		  Mercury and a one day introduction to the CVS, compiler and
		  build systems.

	Simon Taylor (stayl):
		- Has implemented unification expressions as discussed
		  in last week's meeting.
		- Has added the option of supplying user-defined
		  operator tables to the parser.
		- Has fixed up the handling of libraries directly from
		  mmc, adding the option of overriding settings by
		  command line switch rather than several environment
		  variables.

		  There was some discussion on this point, the general
		  concensus being that there needed to be a
		  simplification of the interface to the build system.
		  Simon is working on this issue.

Minutes taken by Ralph Becket (rafe@cs.mu.oz.au)