In article ······@arp.anu.edu.au (Zdzislaw Meglicki) writes:
>The 5th generation MITI project wasn't really all that expensive. At
>the best of times only about a 100 people worked at ICOT in Tokyo. Also,
>the project didn't really die. It's been extended and the work now
>continues on producing UNIX ports of KL1 and various other software systems
>developed using the PSI and PIM machines. A relatively small number of
>experimental "Prolog Machines" (strictly speaking they should be called
>KL1 or ESP machines, but to me KL1 and ESP look so much like Prolog
>that...) was produced by Mitsubishi. These were quite freely given
>to the researchers in other countries who were interested in joining
>the project.
>
Although KL1 and the very similar Parlog and Concurrent Prolog,
developed in England and Israel respectively, *look* like
Prolog, and indeed originated from attempts to parallelise
Prolog, in my experience of programming with them the radical
changes they make to Prolog's underlying model mean that it
makes no more sense to refer to them as "dialects of Prolog"
than it does to refer to say C++ as a "dialect of Cobol" since
both are imperative languages.
I only really began to appreciate these languages when I
stopped thinking of them in terms of Prolog and started
thinking of them as general purpose concurrent object
languages. In my opinion these languages are now being held
back by the mistaken belief that they are "parallel dialects
of Prolog".
Matthew Huntbach