Back from ECOOP'98 in Brussels

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear happy Tunesers,
   I'm right back from ECOOP'98 in Brussels, where I measured the temperature
of research in computer science (state of the art as well as state of
the hype). There were many interesting things there, and lots of stupid
things, too, so one had to sort out the good from the bad ("séparer le bon
grain de l'ivraie"). To talk only about the good stuff:
   Marc Shapiro talked about Distributed GC.
   Malcolm Atkinson talked about Orthogonal Persistence (and had an
impressively slow unexpected NT reboot).
   Matthias Felleisen and Phil Wadler independently proposed their own way
to decouple of fixpoint from signature extension when declaring "classes" of
objects, to achieve better expressiveness than standard inheritance, though
neither did make that an explicit goal of their constructs -- it just
happened naturally (and implicitly) to them as they strived to make things
better.
   Akinori Yonezawa and others going towards generic uses of metaprogramming
as the basic mechanism to define and control programs, such as partial
evaluation of customized interpreters.

So the CS community is slowly converging towards the ideas
that we want to promote with TUNES. That's good.
We still do need TUNES to integrate all these into a one unified system,
instead of having lots of features awkwardly and incompatibly added
to M$Crap or J*crap.

## Faré | VN: Уng-Vû Bân   | Join the TUNES project!  http://www.tunes.org/ ##
## FR: François-René Rideau |    TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System     ##
## Reflection&Cybernethics  | Project for a Free Reflective Computing System ##
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
                -- Philip K. Dick