The Poplog multi-language AI developent system is now available free of
charge, with full system sources.
Although it is free it can be used for any purpose whatsoever
(Copyright notice is based on XFree86. May later be replaced by GPL).
What is Poplog?
It is a portable system including incremental compilers for Pop-11,
Common Lisp, Prolog and Standard ML, along with a huge amount of system
documentation, teaching materials for AI/Cognitive Science, the
Sim_agent Toolkit, vision libraries, and other things.
"Poplog" is a trade mark of the University of Sussex, where most
of Poplog was developed, starting with Pop-11 on a PDP11/40 computer
in the mid 70s, inspired by the Edinburgh AI language Pop2.
Poplog/Pop-11 is used in the Clementine Data-Mining system of ISL,
though ISL no longer sell Poplog. (Commercial users can consult ISL
about support and training: www.isl.co.uk)
For more information, see
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/poplog.info.html
For information about the free versions available, and various teaching
and research support libraries for AI see:
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html
This includes versions of Poplog V15.53 for
Solaris+Sparc (works on Solaris 7 as well as earlier versions)
PC Linux (RedHat 5.x, and 6.0) with or without motif
There slightly older versions for
PC+Solaris86
Dec Alpha + Digital unix
Reduced version (no graphics, nothing that depends on X)
PC+Windows95/98 (may work on NT also?)
Poplog comes with masses of online documentation: this can be browsed at
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/doc/
(Experts may wish to look at the doc/popref/ subdirectory.)
There's an online (slightly out of date) primer for the Pop-11
language which is the core of Poplog. It is similar in power to
Common Lisp, with list processing, pattern matcher, object-oriented
libary, external interface, etc., but with a syntax some people find
more approachable. Browse the primer at
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/primer/START.html
Alternative formats for the primer are available in this directory:
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/
A slightly zany tutorial file on story grammars can be read in
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/teach/storygrammar
COMP.LANG.POP
Comments and questions about Poplog and Pop-11 may be posted to the
comp.lang.pop newsgroup, which is linked to an email list.
See
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/newsgroup.txt
(Please do NOT post general conference announcements, advertisements,
etc.)
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 (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html
May I congratulate you for making Poplog "open source".
Mike Reddy
--
The box said: "Requires MS Windows 3.11 or better"... so I got a Macintosh!
--
Email: ······@glam.ac.uk CU-Seeme: 193.63.130.40 (On Request)
Web: http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/mreddy/
Snail: J228, Dept. of Computer Studies, University of Glamorgan,
Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan. CF37 1DL Wales, UK.
TEL: +44 (0)1443 482 240 Fax: +44 (0)1443 482 715
HOME TEL: +44 (0)1443 402 685 (Emergencies only)
From: Stephen Isard
Subject: Re: Free Poplog with sources now online
Date:
Message-ID: <3797076A.1543@ed.ac.uk>
This free Poplog is wonderful. Thanks and congratulations to Aaron and
the others who contributed to the liberation effort.
I've noticed one feature which I think is unintended. In the sun
solaris system that we downloaded, the standalone xved ignores
command line arguments (other than -help). That is, if I give a
command
xved junk.p
or
xved -do 'teach xved'
I just get a window displaying the empty file "temp.p", in the same way
as if I had given the bare command
xved
The standalone plain ved command treats the command line arguments as
the documentation says it should.
I suspect the answer may lie in the procedure xved_standalone_setup
in the file LIB XVED_STANDALONE_SETUP.
Stephen Isard
·······@ed.ac.uk
From: Aaron Sloman See text for reply address
Subject: Re: Free Poplog with sources now online
Date:
Message-ID: <7na88k$9qi$1@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk>
After I announced the free Poplog site
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html
······@glam.ac.uk (Mike Reddy) wrote:
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 22:04:27 +0100
> Organization: Dept of Computer Studies, Glamorgan University
>
> May I congratulate you for making Poplog "open source".
>
> Mike Reddy
>
> --
> The box said: "Requires MS Windows 3.11 or better"... so I got a Macintosh!
> --
> Email: ······@glam.ac.uk CU-Seeme: 193.63.130.40 (On Request)
> Web: http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/mreddy/
> Snail: J228, Dept. of Computer Studies, University of Glamorgan,
> Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan. CF37 1DL Wales, UK.
> TEL: +44 (0)1443 482 240 Fax: +44 (0)1443 482 715
> HOME TEL: +44 (0)1443 402 685 (Emergencies only)
I should make it clear that although I have set up the FTP site here
in Birmingham, none of this would have been possible but for the
excellent work done by the Poplog developers at Sussex University.
We also need to thank Sussex and ISL (who used to market Poplog
commercially) for agreeing to allow free distribution with open
source.
I am still working on the FTP site, e.g. adding a bugfixes
directory, and producing information for people wishing to set up
mirror sites. I'll broadcast information about this from time to
time.
Some people have had problems using winzip on PC/Windows to install
PC poplog, an answer to this problem, provided by Alan Littleford is
in
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/bugfixes/BUGREPORTS
But I don't know whether more needs to be said.
Since most of the Poplog documentation is geared to the Unix/VMS
environment (with X facilities), it would be nice if someone who is
familiar with PCs (unlike me) and who understands Poplog can provide
useful documentation for complete beginners, e.g. how to start up prolog
or lisp or ML instead of pop11, etc. how to save files in a different
directory from the Poplog directory.
(Having had a tiny taste of a PC while trying out Poplog under Windows95
I simply can't believe that any operating system designer in the 1990s
could be so irresponsible as NOT to provide proper support for multiple
users of the same machine, with protection against different users
clobbering each other's files. Just calling it a "personal computer" is
no justification, given the actual uses of such machines in offices, in
private homes, schools, universities, etc. Are all the millions of MS
customers, including commercial customers, too stupid to complain about
this???)
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 (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html
From: Fernando Mato Mira
Subject: MS Flame 2000 (wae: Free Poplog with sources now online)
Date:
Message-ID: <379B77C0.570AF8D@iname.com>
Aaron Sloman See text for reply address wrote:
> (Having had a tiny taste of a PC while trying out Poplog under Windows95
> I simply can't believe that any operating system designer in the 1990s
> could be so irresponsible as NOT to provide proper support for multiple
> users of the same machine, with protection against different users
> clobbering each other's files. Just calling it a "personal computer" is
Gee. I wish it were just that. You can't have multiple versions of a DLL
installed either, so it doesn't provide proper support for a _single_ user
either (whether they call it "Workstation", "Server", "2000" or whatever).
_single_ application, _single_ user would be more appropriate. Wait no,
not even _single_ app (unless maybe if it comes from Redmond, too).
</F>
From: Aaron Sloman See text for reply address
Subject: PC Windows Poplog can now be extracted with Winzip
Date:
Message-ID: <7nl1lr$c3h$1@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk>
After I announced this
> The Poplog multi-language AI development system is now available free of
> charge, with full system sources.
> ..
> ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html
unfortunately, some people found that after fetching the PC Windows
9x version of Poplog they could not extract it with WinZip because
each subdirectory in the tar file had an empty file, and WinZip
decided that because they were empty they could not possibly be
needed, and therefore did not extract them.
This screwed up installation of Poplog, alas (I don't know why).
An extracter from PCWARE worked fine.
Some people managed to get it to work by creating the required empty
files, i.e. disk1.id in disk1, disk2.id in disk2, etc.
Anyhow I have now rebuilt the tar file after replacing the empty
files with dummy NON-empty files. It is in
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/new/pcwin-15.5.tar.gz
Now even Winzip believes they are needed and extracts them, so that
installation works.
Apologies to anyone who wasted time fighting the original version.
If you know the makers of Winzip tell them not to do things like
that....
(Note the PC version of Poplog has none of the graphical facilities,
and some of the interfaces to the operating system don't yet work
properly. Maybe some PC expert will look into the problems and fix
them?)
MIRROR SITES
If anyone wishes to set up a mirror site for poplog, I'll try to
keep a set of links in this directory
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/.for.mirrors/
to all the files that need to be fetched.
Comments and suggestions to comp.lang.pop please.
Thanks.
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 (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html
From: Lee Naish
Subject: Re: PC Windows Poplog can now be extracted with Winzip
Date:
Message-ID: <7np08r$4uf$1@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
···················@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman See text for reply address) writes:
> WinZip
>decided that because they were empty they could not possibly be
>needed, and therefore did not extract them.
>This screwed up installation of Poplog
Its not the first time that a huge organisation intent on dominating the
entire world has failed to appreciate the importance of zero. Lets hope
history repeats itself:-)
lee