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Date:Mon Dec 20 21:32:26 2001 
Subject:Re: Thirty years of frustration (:-/)... 
From:Pete Goodeve 
Volume-ID:1011220.03 

In article <9vonad$2qv3$1@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk>,
 <A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
>pete@jwgibbs.cchem.Berkeley.EDU (Pete Goodeve) writes:
>>                         I assume it's being used for instruction at
>> Sussex.
>and a number of other places, including the University of Birmingham
>where it is the main AI teaching language for beginners -- with lots
>of extensions to the default teaching stuff that comes with poplog,
Yes, sorry -- of course I realized it is being used at Birmingham, but
somehow I missed mentioning it above...

>also in Oklahoma
>and at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where Matthias Scheutz
>is using the sim_agent toolkit in his AI course, and in Griffiths
>University in Australia where Terry Dartnall has been using it for
>several years, and until recently in the psychology department in
>Nottingham university (where they had to abandon teaching AI
>programming because it wasn't thought to be relevant by the
>British Psychological Society -- which has killed off a lot of good
>courses in psychology departments).
>and in other places.
Hmmm.  Looks to have a fairly healthy niche ecology, then.  Glad
of that.  Thanks for all the URLs.  I'll follow them up.
>
>
> [stuff on matching .......]
 I haven't got to playing with matching yet, but thanks for the tips.
>
>To get a feel for the current state of Pop-11 try the primer [....]
Thanks.  I've downloaded the HTML, so it's handy on my local machine
when I need it.
>
>> >And there are a great many things that you can do now that the
>> >book won't mention.
... So I noticed... (:-/)  In fact, the actual online documentation is,
shall we say, daunting...  [see below, though]
>
>Including use of a powerful object oriented system, objectclass,
>comparable in power to Common Lisp CLOS, but geared to the pop-11
>style of programming (designed by Steve Leach, and used in the
>Sim_agent toolkit and for graphical extensions to pop11.)
This sounds nice.  I had noticed its existence, but haven't had a chance
to investigate yet.
>
>>
>> [What I would love to do is get it working under BeOS (!)
>I don't know if you'll find it helpful, but you can try browsing the
>stuff in here:
>    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc/
Thanks.  I'm going to have to get a lot more familiar with all the
mechanisms before I even think of porting, but I do intend to try.

>If you manage to port it, perhaps you'll donate the resulting
>package to the free poplog site (mirrored at www.poplog.org) ?
Of course -- be glad to.


In the meantime, I don't know if anyone's interested, or if the
veddists will throw up their hands in horror, but I decided I needed
a different way of reading the docs.  I must confess that one thing
I find a bit antiquated is reading the docs via VED.  It's partly
that the navigation keys are different by default (which I have now
fixed, having found how to use vedinit.p) but more that reading
through a ten-line window is a pain.  For the extensive reading I
need to do at this stage a web browser is much more convenient.
(Not always, of course.  The VED mechanism is *very* nice for getting
quick info on a keyword or builtin procedure, for instance.)

So I've hammered together a PHP script that lets me access the doc
files from my browser.  I can either type in the file I need, or click
on it in the directory listing presented by the script.  The script
also does its best to tag all the cross-references with HTML links,
so "HELP * VED" for example becomes a link (through the script again,
naturally).  It's not perfect, because it only finds references of
exactly that form (or "REF * ...", "DOC *...", or "TEACH *...") but
that's enough for most navigation.

As I say, the script is in no way polished -- PHP is another language
I'm fairly new to -- but I'm finding it useful.  If anyone wants it,
I'll be happy to make it available.  Actually you can try it at:

	http://jwgibbs.cchem.berkeley.edu/pop11

Cheers,
					-- Pete --