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Date:Mon Dec 19 00:34:21 2001 
Subject:Re: Thirty years of frustration (:-/)... 
From:A . Sloman 
Volume-ID:1011219.02 

pete@jwgibbs.cchem.Berkeley.EDU (Pete Goodeve) writes:

> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 06:09:53 +0000 (UTC)
> Organization: University of California, Berkeley
>
> In article <3C1DE5FD.74C7@ed.ac.uk>,
> Stephen Isard  <S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> >Pete Goodeve wrote:
> >> I've found the 'mini-linux' version compiled for libc5, and -- Yaay!
> >Good.  That makes you the second recorded user.
> Ooohh!  Joining a select crowd, eh? (:-))  I wonder how large the Pop
> community actually is?  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,
e.g. here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/teach/
and associated libraries and demosntrations
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/auto/
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/lib/

also in Oklahoma
    http://webdb.okcu.edu/lsells/
        Follow the HCAT link (it has some useful pop11 pointers)

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.


>...
> >
> >> So now I just have to open up my old Pop11 book and start slaking that
> >> thirst
> >Beware that things have changed a bit over the years.  Mostly for the
> >better, I hope, but you may find that some POP2 constructions won't
> >work.

Most of the old constructs still work, but many of them (e.g. using
"vars" for local variables) are not recommended since "lvars" gives
lexical scoping which is generally safer (and makes lexical closures
work properly).

However the Pop-11 pattern matcher will not work with lvars variables
unless you fetch the "!" pattern prefix from the birmingham site
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/pattern.tar.gz

There is a new more powerful pattern matcher released one of the very
recent versions of poplog, described in HELP equal, designed and
implemented by John Gibson shortly before he retired. But it uses a
different syntax from the old matcher (and allows "=" to be used
for matching if the second argument includes pattern elements).

To get a feel for the current state of Pop-11 try the primer, in
html here
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/primer/
        (with some new diagrams added recently in the
        "Minimal Model" section.)

or packaged here:

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/pophtmlprimer.tar.gz

or plain text (without the diagrams)
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/teach/primer

> >And there are a great many things that you can do now that the
> >book won't mention.

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.)

> Well it *is* a Pop-11 book (Laventhol, which I saw in Dillon's a few years
> ago, and snapped up).

At its time that was very good introduction for beginner
programmers.

> I'd love to have the Silver Book, but the only copy
> I know of is in that Finchley Library -- somewhere tucked away in their
> storage stacks...  (I think I last checked about 15 years ago.)

Someone "borrowed" my copy many years ago, and never returned it.
(If you are reading this, please note...)

> Anyway, everything seems to work, but there's a lot of exploring to do.
>
> [What I would love to do is get it working under BeOS (!)  That's what I
> use on my home system.  x86 BeOS executables are the same ELF format as
> Linux, but of course the libraries are different.  The linking ("Chicken
> and Egg") problem has me foxed at the moment.]

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/

also packaged as a tar file:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc.tar.gz

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

Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html