Nico Aragon <nico@nicoaragon.com> wrote:
> Also I'm curious about the development status of PopLog. Is someone
> working maintaining and improving it?.
Until SPSS bought ISL a few years ago in order to get Clementine (See
www.spss.com) development work on poplog was being done at ISL and
Sussex. The port to windows NT was done for the purpose of running
Clementine, with a proprietary (and expensive) X emulation package.
Since Poplog became a free open source system there has been no
formal development team, though various users have done things.
E.g. Steve Isard in Edinburgh produced a reduced version of pop-11
to run on very small linux systems using libc5:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/mini-linux-pop/
There have been various high level extensions. E.g. David Young at
Sussex university has continued developing his popvision library
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision/
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision.tar.gz
At Birmingham we have been adding graphical tools illustrated
briefly here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/rclib/
the sim_agent toolkit (including poprulebase, a fairly powerful forward
chaining rule interpreter) described here
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cogaff/simagent.html
and quite a lot of AI teaching and utility libraries of various
sorts.
The current linux version of poplog was not developed until just after
SPSS bought ISL, and consequently it was not as polished as the versions
of poplog that were commercial products packaged by ISL. Various small
fixes and extensions were suggested by users, e.g. this stuff:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linuxterm/
There are some readers of the news group (maybe only one) who are
working on automatically developing a pop-11 interface to GSL (the gnu
scientific library http://sources.redhat.com/gsl/).
Jeff Best recently posted something about this to comp.lang.pop.
It would be good if someone could combine the existing poplog+aix+ppc
sources with appropriate bits of poplog+linux sources and produce a
versoin of the Mac + OSX. A really knowledgeable person could probably
do it in a few weeks. But it might take a lot longer for someone who is
not familiar with poplog's internals.
The bulk of the poplog core has been sufficiently robust and usable
(with possibly one of the fastest garbage collectors in existence) that
most people have just been content to use it. I.e. there has not been
a steady stream of reported bugs needed fixing, though there are some
obscure bugs that occaisionally cause problems (e.g. in XVed), and
someone has recently reported problems using external load on C
libraries compiled elsewhere. They work with an old version of poplog,
but if poplog is re-linked to overcome another problem, those C
libraries cannot be externally loaded by pop11.
This is some sort of C library compatibility problem rather than a bug,
I suspect.
Sometimes problems arise with re-linking poplog after an operating
system change. Someone at Praxis provided a shell script to do this
more easily, available here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/tools/
However there are many little things and some big things that need
attention in pop-11, the external interface, the editor, etc.
These include providing graphics for windows poplog, and providing a
better interface for editors like Emacs, since not everyone wants to use
the poplog editor Ved.
However many have found the existing emacs+ved package, last exended by
Brian Logan, quite usable, despite the lack of good support in poplog
for a separate editor:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/emacs/
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/emacs.tar.gz
I know someone who hopes to get a student to work on graphics for
windows poplog, but I don't know how hard that will be.
I had hoped to get research council finding to hire someone to work
full time on poplog here in Birmingham, but I have been so busy with
other things, I never got round to it.
So for now it is just a loose mutual-help community of users.
Perhaps you can contribute some useful extensions for those who want to
use pop-11 in web servers.
One day I would like to try setting up a server using the pop-11 eliza
program, which seems to be no worse than many others on the web, and
better than some! The code for our local version is here, if you wish
to try it when you have your server code working:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/lib/elizaprog.p
It is easily edited to add rules to suit the current context.
Just copy the "newrule" syntax. There are lots of examples
starting around line 475.
Aaron
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