We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri Nov 24, 3:15pm to 4:15pm.

Attendees:
	David Jeffery 
	Mark Brown 
	Zoltan Somogyi 
	Tyson Dowd 
	Simon Taylor 
	Kevin Glynn 

1.  General Discussion

	Summer students are starting next week, on Monday.  Tyson and
	Fergus are giving talks on Mercury (mostly following Zoltans
	433-257 notes, but unlike last year we will intersperse the
	talks with "lab classes" to break up the lectures and give
	students a bit of time to practice).
	
	Accounts need to be created for the students on the Mercury
	machines.  We need to decide where machines will be put for the
	students in the Mercury office.

	We also discussed the possibility of making the module qualifier
	`.' in time for this release.  We decided this might be better
	as a post-release change, and we will backport it to the release
	and make a point release (Zoltan's pun, not mine).

	One possible project that we would like someone to do in future
	is a Mercury code reformatter that preservers commenting.  This
	would help us provide transitional tools for syntax changes.

	The long names of mercury scripts were discussed and everyone
	was happy enough with the `mercury_*' names that have been
	suggested on mercury-developers.

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.

	Tyson Dowd 

		- has been working on getting the IL backend library
		  working.  All the changes have been made, but there
		  are some hitches with :- external and the multiple
		  foreign language interface.

		- zs suggested writing a proposal on the intended goal
		  and workings of the foreign language system, which
		  Tyson agreed was a good idea.

	Mark Brown :
	
		- has been working on his recently submitted change to
		  do term dependency analysis in the declarative debugger. 

	Simon Taylor 
		- Working on getting aditi to call Mercury -- now
		  list__append works.

	David Jeffery :
		- Has been working HAL

	Zoltan Somogyi :
		- Has been working on putting MR_ prefixes on everything
		  to make Mercury namespace clean (this is a release
		  goal).
		- Plans to work on retry across IO, an accurate GC code
		  generator abort, and a typeclass bug before the
		  release.

	Kevin Glynn :
		- Once again, Kevin has done no Mercury work.
		  Is this the laziness that functional programmers talk
		  about?

Minutes taken by Tyson Dowd .