keld@diku.UUCP (Keld J|rn Simonsen) (08/10/85)
<> EUUG Copenhagen Conference Technical Programme (provisional) The technical programme in Copenhagen features a row of interesting speakers and topics. Brian Kernighan on troff and awk First of all, we are pleased to present the first keynote speaker, Brian W. Kernighan of AT&T Bell Laboratories research department, who is one of UNIX' fathers. He was the one to put UNIX style and philosophy out of Bell Labs by co-authoring the famous books "The Elements of Programming Style" (with P.J.Plauger), (also in Pascal) "The C Programming Language" (with D.M.Ritchie) and "The UNIX Programming Environment" (with Rob Pike). These are among the most well written books in computer literature, the C book is also known as the "C Bible". Brian is also well known for his work on the UNIX tools troff and awk. Troff is a text formatter, fit for typesetters and capable of setting complicated mathematical equations and fine tables in boxes and all. Brian has augmented troff with facilities for complicated graphics and he will give a talk on his latest developments here. He will also speak on his latest works on awk, a report generating language, resembling C a lot, making it quite easy to do complicated things on ordinary textfiles. Bjarne Stroustrup on C++ The other keynote speaker is Bjarne Stroustrup, also of AT&T Bell Laboratories research department. Bjarne has done some interesting work on C, extending the language to incorporate "Classes". A class is a concept borrowed from the programming language Simula facilitating modular programming in a very general and clean way. Bjarne will tell us how these new facilities are used in his "incremented" C langage and compiler, the C++. C++ is heavily used at Bell Labs and is internally known just as "C", the ordinary C compiler is named "Old C". Bjarne will also tell us how he used the Class concept to implement streaming i/o in a clean way. Standardisation. There will be almost a day (Thursday) in the technical programme focussing on standardisation in the UNIX world. The X/OPEN group of big European UNIX manufacturers: Olivetti, Siemens, Philips, Bull, ICL and Nixdorf will present a talk on their work on a definition of a new standard interface to UNIX like the "System V Interface Definition" - in cooperation with AT&T and UNIX Europe Ltd (UEL). It is hoped that this new definition can be ready in time for the Copenhagen conference. Also we hope to have UEL give a talk on AT&T's efforts on standardisation, especially international standardisation, of concern to many of EUUG's members. And we might have somebody from /usr/group coming and tell about their standards effort. Mike Banahan of the Instruction Set, London will present a talk on the ANSI work on standardisation of C. Mike is EUUG's representative in this standards committee. Mike O'Dell will give a talk on the merits of standardisation in opting for at bigger market share, that should be an interesting talk. C. Sexton of Motorola Ireland will give a talk on European Languages in UNIX, and internationalization is also the main issue of the afternoon's Bird of a Feather session, where EUUG will try to establish a standards committee on International UNIX together with other interested parties. It is also hoped that other speakers will comment on the work on internationalization in their talks. Networking. The Wednesday afternoon is set aside for a double session on networking: remote file systems, mail handler standards, protocols and related issues. Doug Kingston of CWI, Amsterdam (CWI is also known to netters as McVax, Doug was formerly employed at Ballistic Research Laboratories, USA) will give an overview of remote file systems, and also a glance of the implementation at CWI. We will have at least on talk on the new ISO mail handler standard X.400 and the experiences with the University of British Columbia, Canada implementation of it for UNIX systems. A Bird of a Feather session is scheduled late Wednesday afternoon for those interested in EUUG's European UNIX network, eunet. Languages. There will be a lot of computer language issues at this conference, indeed most of the Friday will be devoted to this issue. Bjarne Stroustrup will speak on his work on C++, as noted above. There will also be a talk on the language that inspired Bjarne, namely Simula, by one of the insiders of Simula, George Philippot of NCR Norway. George is one of the people on the portable Simula project and will talk on Simula under UNIX. We also hope to present a talk on another Simula-inspired language/system, namely Smalltalk from Xerox. Smalltalk is also a very graphic oriented system, which now runs on quite some UNIX systems, mostly on Motorolas. Brian Kernighan will talk on awk as noted, and there will be at least one talk on yacc, by Theo de Ridder of Enchede TH, The Nederlands. He will talk on his work on better error handling in yacc. So together with the ITS whole-day tutorial on fast prototyping including awk and other good stuff, or with the Instruction Set tutorial on yacc and lex, this conference is a great opportunity to learn the advanced language tools of UNIX, together with getting an impression of the newest developments. Text processing. The Thursday afternoon is filled with things related to textprocessing, although at least one has also relations to standardisation. The keynote speaker, Brian Kernighan, will speak as noted above on his recent developments in troff. Chuck Bigelow of Standford AI, USA gives a talk on digital font editing, which should be a quite entertaining speach. Sexton will speak on European languages, and David Tilbrook (famous for sticking together the programme of the latest many EUUG conferences) will talk on 'cat -v considered harmful' considered harmful. Those knowing David will know that this is not a speach to miss. Kernel The Wednesday morning is (apart from welcoming and Brian Kernighan's talk on awk) for issues on the UNIX kernel. Hans van Someren of ACE in Amsterdam will give a overview of Virtual Memory implementations including S5R2 and also some insights on what ACE did to it. Other issues. This is what the programme committee have at the moment. There are still some slots to be filled out, and we are working hard to get the rest of the wanted speakers to agree. In fact we have so many other interesting talks on the roof, that we plan double sessions the Friday morning. An interesting thing here is of cause the EUUG annual general assembly, placed in the early morning after the conference dinner. Also we have something up our sleave for the goodbye session including prizes for the best performance in various topics of the exhibitors, to pep up that side of the arrangement. A complete overview of all the things happening at the EUUG Copenhagen arrangement is seen in the 'Conference at a glance'-table. Copenhagen Tape Distribution, net.sources Also there will be a great opportunity at the Copenhagen Conference to obtain a lot of free software. For the first time on EUUG conferences it is planned to host a tape copying service, where members of EUUG can come and exchange software (which is to be put in the public domain by agreement). Free sources from the net (net.sources, net.sources.mac, net.sources.games) will be available, and also the GNU Emacs, MMDF, hack and the Wang Institute statisics package will be there, so here is the chance to get it! The software will only be available on 1/2 inch 1600 fpi magnetic tape in tar format, and you should bring with you a 2400' tape. We intend to make the copying so you can have it with you when you leave. This is for congress participants only, the tape will be available to other EUUG members via normal procedures from the EUUG software distribution center at mcvax. So, hope to see you in Copenhagen!