I recently heard of a language called POP-11 which aroused my curiousity.
Apparently it contains elements of LISP and Prolog, and was developed around
the same time as Prolog. Does anyone have any information, such as its
intended target audience, its uses, and whether any compilers/interpreters
exist (preferably for Amiga or PC/XT)???
Thanks in advance,
::: John
//\|_||\| ...{alberta|ubc-cs|utai}!calgary!aycock
\/ \/| || |
From: Richard O'Keefe
Subject: Re: POP-11; any information???
Date:
Message-ID: <2714@munnari.oz.au>
In article <····@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP>, ······@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (John Aycock) writes:
> I recently heard of a language called POP-11 which aroused my curiousity.
> Apparently it contains elements of LISP and Prolog, and was developed around
> the same time as Prolog. Does anyone have any information, such as its
> intended target audience, its uses, and whether any compilers/interpreters
> exist (preferably for Amiga or PC/XT)???
Pop-11 is a descendant of Pop-2, which is an AI language developed in the
UK. You are confusing it with the Poplog system, which contains
Pop-11
Prolog (not "elements of" Prolog, the whole thing)
Common Lisp (not "elements of" Lisp)
ML
all of which can call each other a screen editor, a "foreign code"
interface, and oodles of source code libraries. The four languages are
implemented as compilers to a common intermediate format with
machine-specific back-ends to generate machine code. Its original
target was anyone with a VAX, but it has been ported to several other
machines including 680x0s of various sorts. I'm afraid it just would
not fit on a PC/XT (I _think_ there is an 80386 UNIX version).
Version 13 was being released in January of this year.
Quoting from a message I received:
It has, at last, a complete Common Lisp as defined by Steele. Their
Common Lisp is not as fast as some but it is very much more compact than
most. E.g. including POP-11 and the editor and development tools (not
as fancy as some) it takes less than 2 Mbytes on a Sun or Vax. POP-11
remains even slimmer, at less than 1 MByte to start with, yet provides
most of what you can get from Common Lisp, and quite a lot that you
can't.
Some of the things put in for CL are now available for all the
languages, so Poplog Prolog now includes indefinite precision arithmetic,
rationals, complex numbers, as well as providing access via POP-11 to
arrays, strings, processes, etc.
Poplog also includes (on request) a good (i.e. relatively fast and
robust) implementation of ML, which also comes with a good development
environment, floating point arithmetic, etc. Some computer scientists
are now using PML (Poplog ML) for teaching.
[A port to the Sequent Symmetry was under way and may be available now.
A port to the Orion1/05 was under way and may be available now.
A port to the Pyramid was under way and may be available now.
]
They think there are now over 600 licences around the world: it's in
Japan, Australia, India, Kuwait as well as Europe, UK, USA and Canada.
Many people in industry like it very much. They especially prefer
POP-11 to Lisp as it's so much cleaner and closer to what they already
know. (Despite its flaws.)
US and Canadian academic marketing is being done by Robin Popplestone at
Dept. of Computer and Information Science
Lederle Graduate Research Center
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545 3140/3143
or
Computable Functions Inc.,
35 South Orchard Drive,
Amherst, MA 01002,
tel 0101 413 253-7637
US commercial marketing is being done by
Systems Designers International Inc
Industrial Division
New Castle Corporate Commons,
55 Read's Way,
New Castle,
Delaware 19720 (302) 323 1900 (800)888-9988
A subset of POP-11 (e.g. no lexical scoping) produced by Cognitive
Applications Ltd is now available on the Mac - known as Alphapop. I
believe there will be an enthusiastic review in the April '89 Byte.
Robin Popplestone is also helping to sell that.