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Date:Mon Mar 29 11:04:44 2000 
Subject:Re: Macintosh implementations of Poplog or Pop11 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1000329.04 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

Steve Leach writes:

> ...

> At 11:28 am -0500 28/3/00, Robin Popplestone wrote:
> >I don't know if AlphaPop still works on modern macs I'd rather doubt
> >it. Robin.

> Sadly, AlphaPop did not make the transition to the modern memory
> management scheme.  I believe (but this may be rubbish) that they
> exploited the fact that the old Mac O/S could only address 24-bits
> for tagging - and this changed, as it was bound to change, and Cog.
> App. had seen too little financial return to continue.

For those who don't know: Cognitive Applications Ltd ported pop11
to the Mac around 1986 and called it AlphaPop. It won some stunning
reviews (e.g. in Byte) They used it to provide the first multi-media
guide to the National Art Gallery and did similar things for many
other galleries and museums world wide.

Because it was a completely independent implementation (written in
a dialect of C) rather than a port of Poplog, it was not easily
upgraded as poplog pop-11 developed.

E.g. I don't think it ever supported lexically scoped local variables
(lvars). Nevertheless it was very successful and widely used for a
while, though not commercially successful as a product (It might have
been had it arrived just as AI started to boom around 1983-4, and before
there were good common lisp systems for mac.)

For anyone interested in the current state of Cognitive Applications
see:
    www.cogapp.com

They still mention pop-11 in their "services" page.

Steve wrote

> This summer we will see the launch of MacOS X, of course, and this
> is a true UNIX.  I am absolutely confident that an impromptu
> development team will form to port Poplog for MacOS X.  I have come
> perilously close to getting the DP3 (dev preview 3) release for this.
> Alas, my spare time is negligible at the moment or I would already be
> hacking.
>
> I am not sure how long this port will take since MacOS X is a
> POSIX compliant UNIX and (I think) Poplog has been ported to the
> PPC architecture already.

There is a version of Poplog V 15.52 for AIX on PPC (presumably done
by ISL for a customer) at
    ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/new/powaix-15.52.tar.gz
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/powaix-15.52.tar.gz

I have no idea when it was done, or for whom it was done or whether
anyone is still using it. I think Anthony Worrall at Reading tried
to bring it up to date but had some difficulty.

> I reckon a raw port would be a matter
> of a couple of months.  What gets interesting after that is what
> to do about VED and X.

> MacOS X has the most exciting graphics layer of any popular OS -
> Quartz (display PDF), OpenGL, and Quicktime.

However, if it is proprietary or not available on any other system
we should totally ignore it -- there have been enough of those
monsters!!!!

> How about augmenting Poplog with a full
> set of UI building components to make constructing new editors
> straightforward?!  I'm definitely up for this!

Yes. A high priority item for that grant proposal ....

I think Roger Evans once did some design work in that direction,
though I don't know what remains of that.

Perhaps higher priority still is a properly designed, documented and
implemented interface in pop-11/poplog to *any* remote programmable
editor (whether emacs, Ved, Xved, or Steve's new editor, or perhaps even
something like netscape?).

Then you could do your editing on one machine and interface to a
running poplog on another machine or the same machine and the
resource requirements of the application you are deveoping and those
of the editor you are using need not be in conflict -- one
disadvantage of an integrated editor sharing a heap with the
application you are developing, though it has many benefits as
ved/xved users know.

Aaron