> Is there a grammar for POP/ POP-11/ POP-2 ?
>
> I have heard really nice things about the language, but don't have
> access to a POPLOG system. (I guess some things are better in the UK..)
>
> David (whitten@netcom.com) (214) 437-5255
Poplog is available in the USA, but it isn't free here or there.
There is no published grammar apart from the incomplete and now out of
date syntax diagrams at the back of the book
R. Barrett A. Ramsay A Sloman
POP-11: a Practical Language for Artificial Intelligence
Ellis Horwood and John Wiley, 1985
However this book is very much out of date. I have a new draft
incomplete introduction to Pop-11 which will tell you a lot about the
langauge, and which you can get by ftp, in two formats
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/primer.Z
(compressed ascii text version readable online 217Kbytes)
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/primer.ps.Z
(compressed postscript version, suitable for printing 406Kbytes)
It prints (after uncompressing) at about 180 pages.
It was intended for users of Poplog Pop-11 and includes a lot of cross
references to further information in the online Poplog help/ref/teach
files. Comments welcome if you look at it.
There's a very short (barely comprehensible out of context) summary of a
subset of Pop-11 useful for beginners in the two files
pub/dist/poplog/teach/popcore
pub/dist/poplog/teach/popcore.tex
Latex version for nicely formatted printing.
There are some more examples of Pop-11 code in the lib, auto, and menu
sub-directories of that pub/dist/poplog directory. There's a brief
introduction to Pop-11 syntax and the Poplog X-based graphics facilities
in the file pup/dist/poplog/teach/gstart
All the published books on Pop-11 that I am aware of use the older out
of date version of the language, or for reasons to do with teaching
strategy do not emphasise the use of lexically (statically, texctually)
scoped local variables ("lvars x, y;").
Instead they use (implicitly or explicitly) dynamically scoped
variables ("vars x, y;"). In my new material on Pop-11 I now always use
lexical scoping as the default, except where pattern variables
for the Pop-11 pattern matcher are required. (One day that will
be properly fixed to work with lexical scoping. There is a version of
the matcher that works with lvars, but in some ways is slightly more
restrictive.)
I hope that helps.
Aaron
PS other literature on Pop-11 includes
%E Anderson, James (editor)
%T Pop-11 Comes of Age
%I Ellis Horwood
%D 1989
%O A collection of papers on the history of dialects of Pop, the
%O features and benefits of the language, and some applications using
%O Pop-11.
%A Sharples, Mike et. al.
%R Computers and Thought
%I MIT Press
%D 1989
%O A general introduction to cognitive science and AI based on Pop-11
(Very good especially for students without a background in science or
maths.)
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
All the examples are in Pop-11 and Prolog.
%A Gazdar, G.
%A Mellish, C.
%T Natural Language Processing in POP-11,
%I Addison Wesley
%D 1989.
Versions for Prolog and Common Lisp also available. The programming
examples are now part of the Poplog Contrib Library
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