About 65 participants, including Dijkstra, attended the "Advanced Course on Functional Programming and its Applications" at the University upon Tyne (20-31 July 1981). The following points are of general interest because they seem to have recurred throughout Dijkstra's career:

• He expressed his reservations about Darlington's research on program transformations. This may have been one of the first times in which he did so.
• He was enthusiastic about Stoy's lecture on denotational semantics.
• He expressed his misgivings about LISP.

I am particularly interested in the first item: how to clarify Dijkstra's stance towards Darlington's work?