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Date:Mon Apr 13 23:18:48 1996 
Subject:Re: Books on POP-11 (that are still in print) 
From:A . Sloman 
Volume-ID:960413.02 

Pete

It appears that my earlier response (posted Friday am) to your query
about books may not have reached you. In any case it was not copied to
pop-forum, so here's another copy, Cc-ed to pop-forum.

In my earlier message I forgot to mention this, which our students have
found very readable, and in some ways more interesting and
approachable than standard (engineering-oriented) introductions to AI:

	Mike Sharples et. al.
		Computers and Thought
		MIT Press (1989).

Alas I think this may also be out of print. Silly MIT Press!

Aaron
=======================================================================
> There is one question I have, though. Do you know of any POP-11 text books
> which are currently in print.

Alas no, apart from this:
	Chris Thornton \& Benedict du Boulay (1992)
	{\em Artificial Intelligence Through Search }
	Kluwer Academic (Paperback version Intellect Books)
	 Dordrecht Netherlands & Norwell, MA USA (Intellect at Oxford)
	 ISBN 1-871516-24-2
	 ISBN 0-7923-1868-4

It introduces several areas of AI, including game playing, planning,
parsing, expert systems, concept learning, via search. All examples
are coded in both Pop-11 and Prolog,  and Appendix A is an introduction
to Pop-11. All the code is available  on a 3.5" floppy disk from
Intellect, in Oxford, I believe. For further details you could contact
the authors, at Sussex.
	bend@cogs.sussex.ac.uk  christ@cogs.sussex.ac.uk

Unfortunately they used a subset of Pop-11 which may not behave entirely
as expected in the latest implementations (e.g. assuming that input
variables to procedures default to being dynamically scoped, so they
did not use explicit declarations everywhere where they needed dynamic
scoping. This is true of the previous books also).

If you think my Pop-11 "primer" would be useful you are free to make
copies of it to sell to students. You should be able to get a version
which prints two pages per A4 sheet, in this compressed postscript file:

	primer2.ps.Z

in the Birmingham Poplog ftp directory:

	ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog

There are other things that may be useful there too. The teach
subdirectory includes most of the online teaching material we currently
use, including a plain text version of the primer, and a summary of a
simple core of Pop-11 in teach/popcore.

See the main README file for more information.

If you don't want to have the hassle of printing copies of the primer,
we may be able to sell them to you! I'd have to get our librarian to
estimate cost on the basis of numbers of copies.

However, it's not ideal for total beginners: it is intended mainly for
people who already have some programming experience, and it is therefore
useful for students to look back over after they have spent some time
learning Pop-11.

I think Chris Thornton also has a lot of online teaching material, used
at Sussex.

If I can help in any other way, let me know.
Aaron