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From: sansom <sansom@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
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To: partain@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Subject: Glasgow FP 92

Dear Will,

The Ayr proceedings committee met on thursday to discuss referees
ratings and reports, and has accepted your paper for inclusion in the
final proceedings. Referees comments are appended to this message.
Please could you take these into account in revising your paper. As in
previous years the proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in
their Workshops in Computing series.

We are facing a fairly tight page limit this year, so almost all of the
papers will need to be kept strictly to 12 pages. If you manage to
convince me that you really do need more, then I think I should be able
to make a few exceptions. However, please examine your paper carefully
first before pleading.

The deadline for camera ready copies is

	Friday, Nov 20th

I will send out precise details for layout as soon as I confirm
them with S-V.

John

---------------------------

20.
Will Partain
The {\tt nofib} Benchmark Suite of Haskell Programs

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Its a bit Partainesque (ie flippant) at the moment to meet the style
of previous Proceedings. I like his style but I think it might look amiss
in the final work without some polishing. 

I'm also not sure whether it is timely to write about the suite at all yet 
as it is still a collection of any program Will can get his hands on. A good
suite will have a carefully selected set of programs each with its own point
to exercise. I would like to see this paper include details of why the programs
were chosen, why they are different etc etc. Its too early for Will to do this
though. Therefore I think it might be better as a short paper outlining the
aims and current state of the suite, rather than announce the suite before its
really ready.

My suggestions:

Make the paper tighter by making it shorter.
Make it less humorous.
make it more of a general overview.
Give an example "report" (ghc perhaps ??).

A couple of detailed comments:

3rd page: There is no reference for FLARE so you won't find one!
6th page: Iain says he's not sure he's given you permission to use bspt in
             your Real Subset - would you check with him pls.
          Remove the '??' references.
7th page: First description should be "Perfect Hashing Function", from
             Iain Checkland, *not* Colin R.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The paper makes three contributions: a survey of the state of the
art of benchmarking in general; a specific discussion of
benchmarking lazy functional languages; and documentation for a
Haskell benchmark suite.

The paper is very well written; in fact, it's a joy to read.

A few additions would be helpful:

* A short section showing how to access the benchmark suite by ftp.
Be very specific here.  Give the specific internet address and disk
directory where the benchmark suite will be found.  Say where there
will be a README file giving detailed directions (and make that
README file).  Don't worry about this information becoming
obsolete.  It will likely remain valid for some time to come, and
after all this is a workshop proceedings!

* Criteria for adding new programs to the suite.  Presumably it isn't
a good idea just to accept every program anyone sends -- some
people might even send too many programs.  How are you going to try
to get a representative set of programs?  How many do you want in
the suite?

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