About Working Group 2.4

• Chair: Professor John Gough, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
• Secretary: Dr. Thomas Gschwind, IBM Research, Switzerland
• Memberhsip: 36 members from 11 countries
• Established: 1974

Aim

The primary aim of Working Group 2.4 is to work on software implementation technologies. When originally created, the mandate of the group was to investigate System Implementation Languages. Over time, the interests of the group have evolved while the original focus now appears less important. Consequently, the group decided at its Banff meeting, held in September 1999, to change its name to Software Implementation Technology. IFIP Working Group 2.4 meets roughly every 9 to 12 months to discuss current trends in compiler construction, programming languages and software engineering. During these meetings we also discuss the activities and events to support in the future.

There are many Working Groups under the aegis of IFIP (The International Federation for Information Processing). Nine working groups in related software areas comprise IFIP Technical Committee 2.

Scope

The scope of the Working Group includes, but is not limited to, the following areas of concern:

• The relationship of language design to system construction, maintenance and enhancement.
• Software portability and reusability, and how they can best be achieved using new techniques such as Java and XML.
• Compilation techniques from analysis to code generation and optimization.
• Experience in the use of languages for building system software.
• Software and hardware environments to facilitate the design, construction and maintenance of large software systems.
• The influence of distributed technology, the internet and parallelism on the design, maintenance and efficiency of system software.

The particular focus of the group is upon the pragmatic engineering aspects of the problem: measurements, evaluation, critical comparisons, and development of economically viable techniques.