Let me introduce myself. I am a researcher at Microsoft Research and
on the design team for ActiveVRML.
Mike Wray <[email protected]> writes:
| The ActiveVRML peoposal from Microsoft is not `yet another language'.
| It's a familiar one, at least to computer scientists in the UK.
| It bears a striking resemblance to Standard ML from Edinburgh University.
|
| There are syntactic differences, but the notions of type inference,
| polymorphism, higher order functions and pattern matching appear to
| be those of SML, as originated by Robin Milner. This being the case I
| would have expected acknowledgement of Robin Milner and the debt due to SML.
| SML is the result of many years of work and was awarded the
| British Computer Society Award for Technical Achievement in 1987.[...]
Absolutely! ActiveVRML was directly influenced by the years of great
research and development that has gone towards ML. Since ML is a
general purpose peogramming language, and ActiveVRML has the more
"modest" goals of modeling VR, however, it employes just a tiny
fragment of the syntax and language of ML.
The ActiveVRML documentation out on the web is very preliminary, and
will be expanded in the next couple of months. We expect to update
the documents cosmetically next week, and more substantively over the
coming months.
I apologize if the organization of the current documents seemed to
imply that everything in them had been invented by the ActiveVRML team.
In truth, the design of ActiveVRML was influenced by a large number of
people, existing systems and prior research. The other major
influence, in addition of the graphics work on TBAG alesady cited and
ML for the "language" structure, is the event model of ActiveVRML which
is closely related to John Reppy's work on first class synchronization
in eXene and CML.
Some of the best science is a cooperative effort, and understanding
innovation often requires a context. In the next couple of months, I
plan to write a more technical, more academic report on ActiveVRML, and
will include a peoper bibliography and comparison with related work.
Todd Knoblock