Thanks ...

["P.H.Welch" <P.H.Welch@xxxxxxxxx>]

... it was wonderful!  The CPA 2001 meeting earlier this week!!  Every
paper was interesting and good/very-good/astounding.  Just as important,
everyone I talked to was so good to talk to - it was a real pleasure
to be there.

It was especially nice to meet so many new people and so many youngsters
- I speak relativisticly (?).  The unscheduled "fringe" sessions in the
evenings worked again very well - there's so much new stuff hapening :).
Someone (?) had the bright idea of not stuffing the panel with us old
timers.  So, we had two of the youngsters leading the discussion from
their points of view and that certainly made a positive difference!

It was great that two of our North America friends managed to make it
following the horrors of September 11th - I don't think they had to buy
too many drinks!  I'm glad we held the minute's silence on Tuesday at
the time of the attacks the previous week.

Anyway, I'm now recovered from sleep deprivation - average of 3.5 hours
per night for 3 nights.  Once again, the Esgem delegates won the late
night stamina prize :) ... where do they recruit from?!!

For those who missed it, check out the programme page on:

  http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Events/CPA2001/programme.html

Titles/abstracts for the fringe programme, about which we don't know till
it happens, will appear somewhere on the website shortly.  We'll also
try to get as many of the slide presentations as possible up there as well.

Best paper award went to Adrian Lawrence for his new "acceptance" priority-
dealing compliance-dealing semantics for CSP ("Successes and Failures:
Extending CSP").  Best paper from a student went to Fred Barnes for his
optimising code generator for occam ("transx86 - an optimising ETC to IA32
translator") and for his undefined analysis for uninitialised and mobile
variables.  Best event on the fringe went to Paul Walker and Barry Cook
from 4Links Ltd. for their Spacewire (sort-of T9000 DS-link) switching
nodes with hot re-wiring (and parallel network rediscovery) demonstration
- just what we need for home plug-n-play and space fault tolerance.  Best
conference dinner joke is best left unsaid but went, again, to Johan Sunter
from Philips TASS.  And I can't remember who won The Weakest (Transputer)
Link in the after-dinner entertainment?

But, conference dinner and nostalgia aside, the future was happening here -
in the formal papers, on the fringe and in the endless chatting in the bar
till the late late early hours.  So, thanks again to all us delegates and
especially to the local organisers - Alan Chalmers, Majid Mirmehdi and
Henk Muller.  I don't think any of us wanted to leave!

Till next time,

Peter.