(1999) The main idea is a natural deduction system and lambda calculus for full, classical linear logic. (There are also decorations of the Schellinx translations from the usual lambda calculi into this system, corresponding to call-by-name and by-value, although it turned out that Ichiro Ogata had done more-or-less the same sort of thing, looking at LKQ and LKT, a few months before.) This work is described in Technical Report ACRC/00/014 from the Advanced Computing Research Centre of the University of South Australia (ask the School's secretary to mail you a hard copy).

(1996) The motivating idea of this work was that one can better compare different ways of reducing terms in the lambda calculus by mapping different reduction strategies in different ways into a single third system. The standard example from the distant past is Plotkin's two continuation passing transforms for call-by-name and call-by-value reduction. After the appropriate transformation, each reduction order can simulate the other; in fact, the order is no longer relevant. There is a journal paper (with Odersky, Wadler and Turner) describing the translation of call-by-name and call-by-value into a linear lambda calculus, and call-by-need into an affine calculus; and a conference paper describing how all three calling conventions can be mapped into a single system with separate modes for weakening and contraction. My doctoral thesis is also about this sort of thing.

(1994) The intuitive idea of the call-by-need lambda calculus is to capture both the property of the call-by-name calculus that only needed terms are reduced and the call-by-value behavior that only values are copied. Moreover, call-by-need operates only on terms, without requiring a separate heap of bindings, which can make reasoning with it simpler. There is a journal paper (with Odersky and Wadler).

(1997) Design patterns allow common programming idioms to be re-used from implementation to implementation. With Chris Salzmann, a master's student from the University of Karlsruhe, we have explored the use of design patterns to design self-extendible systems. Chris designed and implemented a prototype in the Pizza programming language, which he'll release after he gets a chance to clean up the code. Our experience with the design is summarized in the paper below. There is a conference paper (with Salzmann).

(1994) Implementations of logic languages, generally speaking, have some sort of computational step which allows reconsideration of previous decisions to bind certain quantifiers to certain identifiers, usually some sort of backtracking. Functional logic languages - again, generally speaking - augment the reduction semantics of functional languages with the backtracking mechanism of logic languages. This work describes an implimentation technique called quasisharing which allows information computed in one branch of a search to be reused when relevant after backtracking into a new branch. The technique resembles Lamping's strategy for optimal lambda reduction. There is a conference paper focusing on the design and the graph calculus, and a workshop paper that discusses the abstract machine (both with Silbermann). My master's thesis is also about this topic.

For my thesis I wrote a package which accumulates the page numbers on which each bibliographic entry is cited, and provides an interface command which allows the page list for each label to be included in the document. N.B.: there is no interface yet for BibTeX; the code is a TeX/LaTeX package only.

Some time ago I wrote a number of Elisp packages.

Package extraregional.el separates the notions of point, mark and region from the notion of selection. The idea is that, usually in a different window, you should be able to select text without affecting the selected window, the current buffer or the values of point at the various windows and buffers. Version 0.2 is a rather smaller package than version 0.1.1: I found that the extras were not really all that useful, and were actually pretty fragile. The older version is still available, although it does not work under Xemacs version 19.3.

Package rmail-labelsorter.el makes labels a little bit easier to handle in Rmail. The code is usable as it is, but is not documented - this situation probably won't change, as I no longer use rmail. Caveat emptor.