We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri Jan 19, 2001,
from 3:15 4:05pm.

Attendees:
	Fergus Henderson (fjh)
	David Jeffery (dgj)
	Julien Fischer (juliensf)
	Ina Cheng (inch)
	Sam Thurairatnam (sthur)
	Levi Cameron (lpcam)
	Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
	Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell)
	Simon Mei (xcsm)
	Tyson Dowd (trd)
	David Overton (dmo)
	Mark Brown (dougl)
	Simon Taylor (stayl)

1. Release

	- There are two outstanding bugs that need to be fixed before the
	  release (in the the hlc backend, and one in asm_fast). These
	  bugs have been recorded on sourceforge (as have other release tasks).
	- Tyson also wants to add a couple of fixes to the IL back end. These
	  are non-critical (ie. release will go ahead without them, but they'll
	  be included if there is time).

2. Progress reports

	We went around the table, with each person in turn discussing what
	they had been working on recently and/or what they were planning
	to work on.

	Fergus Henderson (fjh):
		- Continued working on the new gcc backend. He has been working
		  on bug fixes, and integrating the new backend into mmake
		  and the rest of the build environment. He has not yet tried
		  bootstrapping or running the tests, but it works for
		  everything in the samples and samples/diff directories (but
		  not for all the other subdirectories of samples).
		- Has helped the summer students a bit.

	David Jeffery (dgj)
		- Has been working on HAL.
		- Has worked briefly with Fergus on a bug reported by petdr
		  which resulted in a compiler abort in polymorphism. The
		  cause is now clear, and a fix should come soon.

	Julien Fischer (juliensf)
		- Has been working on discriminated unions for the Java
		  backend. He got enumerations working earlier in the week.
		- Fergus encouraged him to post a diff soon so he can get
		  some decent feedback before the end of the summer.

	Ina Cheng (inch)
		- Has been working on encoding Mercury types in XML.

	Sam Thurairatnam (sthur)
		- Spent the week working on addressing dougl's review
		  comments.

	Levi Cameron (lpcam)
		- The bytecode interpreter is working for simple deterministic
		  code. 
		- Has added support for handling modules to the interpreter.
		- Is working on getting the compiler to generate the stub
		  functions that are currently written by hand.
		- Fergus encouraged him to post a diff of the bytecode
		  interpreter in the next week. (It might be worth posting
		  the whole interpreter too if the diff is too large to read).

	Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
		- Has worked on minimal model tabling with Kostis. The system
		  now passes all of our test cases (although they aren't
		  a very complete set). Kostis is going to send him a whole lot
		  more test cases from XSB which should test things more
		  thoroughly.
		- Has been working with Tom on deep profiling. Tom will
		  run some benchmarks on the different mechanisms that they've
		  implemented. This should be enough to finish off their 
		  paper.
		- Has found a problem with bogus output from the liveness 
		  pass causing havoc for the delay death transformation.
		- Needs to work on the bug in var.m for the release.

	Adrian Pellas-Rice (apell)
		- Has worked on implementing a simple version of sequence
		  quantification in the compiler. 

	Simon Mei (xcsm)
		- Added support for user defined generators to quickcheck.
		- fjh asked about how useful Simon thought this tool would
		  be, and how it compared to the Haskell version, and 
		  encouraged him to think about this and maybe write something
		  about it.
	
	Tyson Dowd (trd)
		- Fixed some IL backend bugs 
		- Has added a new `developer intro' page to the www site
		- Has implemented floating point for the IL backend.
		- Has worked on implementing `foreign_proc'.
		- Has hacked fjh's `cvdr' script to handle branches. He
		  should add this script to the `tools' directory.

	David Overton (dmo)
		- Has been working on the new mode checker.
	
	Mark Brown (dougl)
		- Has been tracking down a bug caused by Tom's changes to the
		  `univ' implementation. (There was a bug in `compare' for
		  univs).
		- Has been tracking down another bug caused by the fact that 
		  I/O now works differently for univ (as it is no longer 
		  handled specially). Tyson agreed to work on fixing io__read
		  and io__write so that they work properly for existentially
		  quantified types.

	Simon Taylor (stayl)
		- Still working on Aditi/Mercury integration, and working
		  towards an Aditi release some time in the future.
			  
Minutes taken by David Jeffery (dgj@cs.mu.oz.au).