LXNY General Meeting:

Philip Wadler will speak on
XML and Lisp

Tuesday 4 January 2000

LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 4 January 2000.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

In particular, all members of FUNY, NYLUG, LUNY!, AnyNIX, the Brooklyn Bunch, and all other Free Software Groups are welcome!

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm and runs until 9:00 pm.
Enter the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and ask at the front desk for the room number.

At exactly 9:00 pm many members will repair to our traditional place of refreshment.

Philip Wadler, of the Functional Cabal^W^W^W^Wserious compiler and categorical hacker, one of the designers of Haskell, the pure, lazy, functional programming language with monads for input/output, member of the W3C XML Query working group, late of Glasgow University, now at Bell Labs of Lucent, will speak at this meeting.

The subject will be XML and Lisp.

Quote from http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/wadler/topics/xml.html

The Next 700 Markup Languages

Philip Wadler.
Invited Talk,
Second Conference on Domain Specific Languages (DSL'99),
Austin, Texas,
October 1999.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a magnet for hype: the successor to HTML for Web publishing, electronic data interchange, and e-commerce. In fact, XML is little more than a notation for trees and for tree grammars, a verbose variant of Lisp S-expressions coupled with a poor man's BNF (Backus-Naur form). Yet this simple basis has spawned scores of specialized sublanguages: for airlines, banks, and cell phones; for astronomy, biology, and chemistry; for the DOD and the IRS. Domain-specific languages indeed! There is much for the language designer to contribute here. In particular, as all this is based on a sort of S-expression, is there a role for a sort of Lisp?

As always, and particularly at this meeting:

All who wish to volunteer to bring Free Software into schools and libraries are invited.

All who wish to tell of successes of Free Software are invited.
All who wish to tell of failures of Free Software are invited.