Dafydd Gibbon is professor of linguistics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and Grigoriy Strokin is studying computational linguistics at Lomonosov University, Moscow, Russia. The responsibilities of the authors are as follows: The requirements specification, including the #showif declaration, priority options for atoms, declared variables, on the fly variables and variable name identity were originated by Dafydd Gibbon; the design specifications for data structures and algorithms, and the implementation of Zdatr 1.n are due to Christoph Schillo, who also ported the system to Windows 3.11. Grigoriy Strokin debugged and improved the implementation in many ways, particularly with respect to variable handling, re-implemented the declared variable pre-processor, implemented all the builtins, ported Zdatr 2.0 to Windows 95, as well as developing a new meta-object concept as an improvement over a range of older declaration constructs. The Zdatr 2.0 libraries were implemented jointly by Dafydd Gibbon and Grigoriy Strokin.
The creators of the DATR language and the original Prolog implementations, Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar, and many other DATR implementers contributed comments on this and previous implementations; particularly significant are the contributions of Doris Bleiching with respect to requirements, and Hagen Langer with respect to formal specifications.
Needless to say, the authors are jointly and solely responsible for decisions on the extensions, which do not necessarily meet with the full approval of our discussants. Indeed some of our suggestions on DATR default semantics and on meta-objects have met with more than eye-brow raising disapproval. However, we have gone to considerable lengths to attain consensus decisions on all features, and where this was not possible to stimulate awareness of requirements extensions and encourage open and detailed discussion and hope that we have not offended too many by too much by not always bowing to what may well turn out to be better judgment.