Having considered Steve Knight's responses to my criticisms of
the Pepper proposals for changing the quotation conventions in
Pop-11 I now accept that those proposals are workable and probably
preferable to the current Pop-11 conventions, given the use of "\"
as a reserved text item to get over the difficulties I described.
I have not thought through the implications of using "\" in this
role, nor whether this is consistent with its use as the standard
`alphabeticiser' as in "don\'t" which should create a word
containing an apostrophe.
Of course all the proposed changes will prove so painful to the
existing Pop-11 users that many of them will want to go on using the
old version (just as many refuse to switch to using lexical
variables: they like the non-lexical defaults: witness the new
book by Chris Thorton and Ben du Boulay "Artificial Intelligence
Through Search" which uses Pop-11 and Prolog throughout, and so
far I've not found a single "lvars" in it!).
So the "pop" community will inevitably be further fragmented once an
implementation of Pepper becomes available.
A new "standard" won't have the same effect as with C, where
everyone (or almost everyone) agreed to a new version because people
trying to produce portable software in C were already suffering from
the incompatibilities between differen versions produced by
different vendors. There's no such pressure for a new standard for
Pop.
Perhaps pressure will be created by producing an implementation
of Pepper that runs on very popular machines where Poplog Pop-11 is
not available, i.e. PCs running MSDOS and Macs !!!!
Aaron
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Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
EMAIL A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk OR A.Sloman@bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-(0)21-414-3711 Fax: +44-(0)21-414-4281
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