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Date:Mon Jun 20 10:30:22 1994 
Subject:PC Pop11 [answer] 
From:Steve Knight 
Volume-ID:940621.02 

This posting is made in answer to the following popular question.


> I write to you in your role as agony uncle, rather than to the whole
> list,  since I reckon this to be a FAQ. Is there a version of Pop11
> available for PC's?

You're right, it is a FAQ.  The short answer is "mostly no".  The
exception is if you are running LINUX rather than DOS.  POPLOG will run
under LINUX.  (LINUX is a free UNIX that runs on PCs.)

The longer answer is that there are a few implementations of "Pop-like"
languages on non-UNIXes or written so that they might 'port to a non-UNIX box,
but they aren't Pop11.  I add full details for each at the end of this
message.

There are two commercial implementations.  There is GLOW on the IBM PC
and AlphaPOP on the Macintosh.  I've no first-hand experience of GLOW
but the reviews I've read imply that it is a relatively distant cousin
of Pop11 and suggest it is not up to serious work.  ALPHAPop is a great
exploratory tool on the Mac but, alas, no good for writing serious
applications.

I can also report that Chris Dollin is working on a portable implementation
of a Pop11 variant called Pepper.  However, it is very much in the
development phase and primarily aimed at his own PC platform which is
an Acorn Archimedes.  I work with Chris, incidentally, and his work is
not well publicised yet.

Somewhat further afield, you may just possibly be interested in a
C-based implementation called McPOPLOG, which appears to
be a fairly extensive system.  It is Canadian (as I recall) and
no one I know has seen or used it.  However, the reports I've read on it
make it sound an impressive effort.  I've included some token material
on it on the remote chance it is of interest.

The lack of a DOS implementation of Pop11 is a serious problem but is
unlikely to go away.  The IBM PC is not seen as an attractive target for
the developers.  I hope this answer is useful even if not terribly
encouraging!

Steve

More details follow.  :-

************************* LINUX

Linux is a complete, copylefted UNIX clone for
Intel 386/486/Pentium machines. It includes Emacs,
X11R5, gcc, TeX/LaTeX, groff, TCP/IP, SLIP, UUCP, the
works.

Contact Matt Welsh, mdw@sunsite.unc.edu
World-wide web reference (URL)   http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/linux.html
[This is a great WWW site, BTW]

************************* ALPHAPop

Currently the only Pop-11 implementation available on micro-computers.
Corresponds very closely to Poplog Pop-11 version 12.0.  Currently only
available on the Apple Macintosh.

AlphaPOP is developed and marketed by Cognitive Applications Ltd.

Alex Morrison
Cognitive Applications Ltd.,
4 Sillwood Terrace,
Brighton BN1 2LR

Telephone:  +44 (0)273 821600


************************* GLOW

The article on GLOW can be found in the UK May 1992 issue of Byte

magazine, page 84UK-8.

For those who haven't got access to this issue, I will give a very
brief summary, including quotes from the article:


    "Glow Comes Out of the Dark" (Dick Pountain)


Inspired by POP-11, Glow is a powerful list-processing language for
MS-DOS.

Glow, like its ancestor POP-11, is an interactive list-processing
language with a syntax that resembles Pascal or structured BASIC.
It supports loops as well as recursion, lists as well as strings, and
objects with multiple inheritance.

A major difference between it an POP-11 is that Glow employs strictly
lexical, rather than dynamic, scoping. This means that the visibility
of any object is governed by the program text (as in Pascal), rather
than the run-time environment.

MS-DOS Glow calls your own external text editor from inside Glow and
compiles directly from the editor, so long as it is not too large.

One difference is in definition of procedures: instead of POP's

    define ... enddefine

Glow uses

    def ... edef

Glow performs I/O via two streams called "source" and "sink" which you
redirect as necessary to real I/O devices, called IODEVS (e.g.
console,keyboard,stderr ...).


The first-release version of Glow that I have is stable, but has some
rough edges ...

Glow is the BASIC of AI languages.

Glow for Macintosh or MS-DOS with manual and user's guide, 69.95
pounds, from

    Andrew Arblaster
    NightOwl software
    Bollostraat 6
    B-3140 Keerbergen
    Belgium
    32-015-234871
    fax:32-015-234871


************************* Pepper

Pepper is a portable C implementation of a POP-11-like language.  It is 
still under active development and I would guess that Chris would welcome
more involvement with this project.  The Pepper language design incorporates 
many intelligent syntactic and semantic revisions to POP-11.

Contact Chris Dollin, kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com.

************************* McPOPLOG

Some guy at McMaster University (in Canada) has implemented something
he calls "McPOPLOG". I've just read a paper on it.

    "The author of this paper has developed and implemented a completely
     new version of POPLOG ...."

    "Section 2 of the paper describes the fundamental differences
     between Sussex POPLOG and McPOPLOG, ..."

    "Our version is about two to three times faster."

    "... and is commercially much cheaper."

Actually, it's quite a small system (he quotes 75kB vs. 650kB for Sussex
Poplog) and the pop syntax is closer to pop-2 than pop-11. Implemented
in C and runs on VAXen and 68000 processor machines.

No doubt you will all tell me that you know all about it, but in case
you don't the full reference is:

    "AI Multilanguage System McPOPLOG: The Power of Communication
     Between its Subsystems", I Bruha, The Computer Journal,
     Vol 35, No 6, 1992