Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!aiva!jeff
From: jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: modules
Keywords: another module scheme
Message-ID: <436@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 13 May 88 16:35:06 GMT
References: <2747@mulga.oz>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aiva (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 24

In article <2747@mulga.oz> lee@mulga.UUCP (Lee Naish) writes:
>
>COROLLARY: It is impossible to get more than two people to agree on a
>	   module system (the failure of the BSI module committee was
>	   therefore inevitable).

I would like to thank you for your clear and reasonable remarks on
modules.  Your proposal too is reasonable.

The failure of the BSI module committee was perhaps inevitable, and it
was more or less because people could not agree, but that wasn't quite
all there was to it.

The main problem was that the personnel kept changing, and when new
people arrived they insisted on refighting all the old battles.  This
happened several times and made it very difficult to make progress.

My own view is that a more stable committee would have been able to
produce a proposal, or at least a document that attempted to set out
the issues fairly.  

Jeff Dalton,                      JANET: J.Dalton@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,        ARPA:  J.Dalton%uk.ac.ed@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.             UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!J.Dalton