This file is accessible as either
Note: "POPLOG" is a trade mark of the University of Sussex.
Poplog was developed in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex and at ISL (now part of SPSS), and is distributed free of charge by courtesy of both organisations.
Additional code and documentation list below were produced by members of the University of Birmingham and other organisations. All of it is free of charge with open source.
Readers who know nothing about the Poplog system or its languages may find it useful to look at this introductory overview http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.info.html and also the comp.lang.pop newsgroup informal FAQ. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/comp.lang.pop.faq.html
Experts may find it useful to look at the draft User Guide to get a feel for the variety of facilities available in poplog.
See also http://www.poplog.org a site set up by two experienced users of Poplog and Pop-11. It includes archives of postings to comp.lang.pop, code libraries, and a partial mirror of this site, among other things.
CORE BIRMINGHAM EXTENSIONS FOR TEACHING (bhamteach)
ADDITIONAL UTILITIES (E.G. PATTERNS, NEWS, LATEX EMAIL)
EASY TO INSTALL COMPLETE PACKAGES
For many years Poplog was an expensive commercial product, first sold commercially by Sussex University for use on VAX+VMS (for UK£3,000) in 1982, and then continually developed, ported to other platforms, and commercially supported up to 1998, first by Systems Designers (from 1983) and later by a spin-off, Integral Solutions Ltd (founded in 1989). At one stage the commercial price was UK£7,500 (+VAT) for workstations, though the educational price was always much lower. Poplog was a solid, reliable, commercial product, used mainly, though not entirely, for AI research, development and teaching. By about 1992 sales had exceeded $5,000,000.
For more information about the history of Poplog and its core language Pop-11 see the poplog.info.html file, mentioned above.
V15.53 (produced in July 1999) included some additions to support recent versions of Linux, and a few minor bugfixes. Apart from that it is the same as the commercial version, used world-wide in the Clementine data-mining system.
For now, version 15.53 is the "reference" version. Reduced versions supporting Pop-11 as a scripting language may become available later, e.g. at www.poplog.org.
As explained below, A directory for bugreports and "bugfixes" has been set up for corrections to library and documentation files.
In the meantime there will be an effort to coordinate further development. Details will be posted in comp.lang.pop and other related newsgroups and in the pop-forum email list.
A mirror site is at http://www.poplog.org.
The copyright notice is available in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/copyright.html
A draft User Guide is available.
To make installation easier, some sample scripts for installing packages and building saved images are in the image-scripts directory, packaged in the file image-scripts.tar.gz
Documentation on rebuilding poplog can be found in sysdoc/rebuilding.
Utilities to help with re-linking or rebuilding will go in the tools/ subdirectory, including a script which will be useful if you have difficulties re-linking unix versions of poplog.
Some versions of Suse linux (and possibly other versions also) do not have the termcap library installed. Instructions of obtaining it can be found in this file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/Suse-Readme.txt
Poplog can be used with Motif (recommended) or without. Two versions of Poplog for linux+PC are available, one linked for use with motif and one linked for use without. (If you get the wrong version, each can be re-linked.) Motif provides a collection of graphical tools for use with the X window system, and the "standard" version of Poplog makes use of them, e.g. in menus used by the editor.
However Poplog can also work without motif. The Birmingham graphical toolkit, RCLIB, available as an add-on to poplog (below) does not require motif, and provdes menus, sliders, dials, and other GUI facilities.
Lesstif used to be recommended as a free alternative to motif, but is no longer needed, since OpenMotif is now available free of charge. It is available from http://www.metrolink.com/products/Motif/download.html
The linux X86 rpm file for OpenMotif is just over one 1Mbyte. A slightly more recent version of Openmotif is included in the "powertools" CD from Redhat, for Redhat 7.1.
Linux poplog downloads follow:
The package includes shell scripts for easy installation of poplog with the main recommended extensions and a script for building saved images to duplicate the facilities in Birmingham. The size of the file is just over 20 Mbytes. Besides linux poplog, it includes the OpenMotif rpm file, in case you don't have it, additional Pop-11 GUI tools (rclib), an agent toolkit (Sim_agent), the Sussex popvision library, a package to enable Emacs users to use Poplog, the html version of the pop-11 primer, and other things. These are all also available separately, as described below.
If requested, I can produce a "split" version for downloading
in pieces. (Email A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk ). I can also provide
a package for users of solaris poplog who wish to replicate the
Birmingham poplog environment.
This version of Poplog has no graphics, no support for X, and only the "dumb-terminal" version of the editor VED (allowing split-window use). It was designed primarily for use with NT, but can work with Win95/98/2000.
The installation instructions for NT/Windows poplog are in the README file, included in the package, and copied here.
This includes a version of windows poplog Version 15.53 including full system sources.
Please report any experiences with this either to comp.lang.pop or to pop-forum AT cs.bham.ac.uk
A number of Emacs users have developed a package that supports similar use of Pop-11 and other Poplog languages from Emacs, and includes utilities for reading the Ved "graphics enhanced" documentation files. The package can be downloaded here: emacs.tar.gz or browsed online here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/emacs/
The Draft User Guide, will give experienced programmers an idea of the contents of Poplog. It shows how to start up Poplog running one or more language compilers possibly with additional saved images, either starting in the editor or talking directly to a compiler. It is partly derived from the "man" file originally distributed with Poplog, and is now the basis for the recommended man file for local installation. The User Guide can be inspected here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup/man/man1/poplog.html
The "bin" sub-directory also includes some sample shell scripts which can be sourced or run by Poplog users, as described in the User Guide.
The whole "setup" directory, including User Guide, man files, sample user startup scripts and copyright notice can be fetched in this file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup.tar.gz
Detailed system documentation for Poplog, Pop-11 and the other Poplog languages (Prolog, Common Lisp, and Standard ML), can be found in the doc/ subdirectory.
All the contents of this directory are also available in a gzipped tar file
See especially the system documentation directory for Poplog and Pop-11 doc/popref/.
The documentation files in the doc/ subdirectory have had all the special VED graphic characters removed, so they should be readable in any browser.
The Poplog implementation of Common Lisp is compatible with Steele's book CLTL2. For missing ANSI Lisp features see doc/lisphelp/bugs
The Birmingham local directories included in the doc/ directory (bhamteach and bhamhelp) contain some online teaching material for an introductory AI programming course, and other things. The bhamteach.tar.gz file mentioned below includes code and documentation. (For windows users it is bhamteach.zip)
The complete sysdoc directory is available as a gzipped tar file http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc.tar.gz
There are also other versions available:
RCLIB can be browsed online in this directory: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/ See the help/ and teach/ subdirectories, especially help/rclib.
Examples of displays produced by the "RCLIB" Graphic Library can be
found in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/rclib/
An overview (plain text) file is here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/help/rclib
The default set of autoloadable menus can be browsed in the rcmenu/menus/ subdirectory. These menu-definition files show the syntax available for specifying environments.
An earlier, less versatile, version of this package, based on
propsheet and motif, is in the menu.tar.gz file listed below.
For a detailed overview of the toolkit see
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cogaff/simagent.html
and the slide presentation using PDF or Postscript at:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/draft/toolkit.pdf
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/draft/toolkit.ps
Poprulebase code and documentation can be browsed online in subdirectories of the newkit/prb/ directory, e.g. tutorial and reference documentation is in the teach/ and help/ subdirectories.
The SimAgent specific code and documentation files can be
browsed in
the newkit/sim/ directory.
Tutorial and reference documentation is in the
teach/ and
help/ subdirectories.
A summary of the main changes to SimAgent (and Poprulebase)
introduced in the summer of 1999 can be found in the
help/newkit file
An example SimAgent tutorial file is
newkit/sim/teach/sim_feelings
The package can be fetched from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision.tar.gz
This now also includes his teaching material on on multi-layer perceptrons (19 Jul 1999).
The package can be fetched from ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/neural.tar.gz
Robin Popplestone's lecture notes on programming paradigms are also available here
A collection of teaching files, help files, autoloadable utilities and demonstration libraries is available packaged for the convenience of Birmingham AI students who wish to duplicate the teaching environment on their own machines running Poplog.
There are two bundles available
The package provides AI tutorial files, help files and supporting libraries produced mainly at Birmingham for teaching programming and elementary AI, including some Ved/Xved tutorials. Some of these are updated versions of the teach files and libraries distributed with Poplog.
It includes the pattern prefix "!" which allows the Pop-11 pattern matcher to be used with lvars variables (lexical locals). The complete list of contents can be found here. The Pop-11 code files and the documentation files can be browsed online.
Most of these revised versions of old files were developed at Birmingham before Poplog became available free of charge, and were not incorporated into the standard distribution. Consequently if installed they will often "shadow" the "standard" versions, and this can cause confusion. Some of the files come from Sussex University, not Birmingham and are made availble with permission of the authors.
It is hoped that if resources become available later, the revised versions will be merged with the standard files and the distributed packages rebuilt.
The Pop-11 and AI teaching and documentation files included in the bhamteach tar package can be browsed online in these directories:
There are other online browsable files included in various packages some of which, though not all, are mentioned elsewhere in this file. E.g.
This contains a growing collection of contributed programs.
ls -FglRt | gzip
which gives a reverse
chronological listing of the complete free poplog directory.
This file
is updated after all major changes.
This file maintained in Lynx-friendly format by:
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/
Last Updated: 18 Aug 2002