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NEWS

• 6 Jan 2005: Single float external function results work in linux poplog

  It was found recently that in Linux Poplog calling external functions (e.g. C or Fortran) that produced single float results did not work properly: the wrong results were returned. This problem has now been fixed. As a result of this all the new features of the Popvision library now work, including the large new 'matlab-like' package. (The packages also work in Sparc/Solaris poplog, which did not have the external function problem.)

• 1 Jan 2005: Some new problems fixed and change notes updated

  Many users have had problems with function keys not working in linux poplog as packaged for Birmingham users in the bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz file. The problem as been been tracked down to a mistake in the file
  $poplocal/local/setup/Poplib/vedinit.p A revised version can be fetched from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup/Poplib/vedinit.p

  The pop11 sockets library does not work on systems where the C library no longer supports 'errno'. The core of poplog was fixed to deal with this in July 2003, but a new version of the socket library was not installed to make use of this fix until today. It can be fetched from
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bugfixes/pop/lib/lib/unix_sockets.p
  and installed in
  $usepop/pop/lib/lib/unix_sockets.p
  This is now included in the standard linux poplog package.

  Descriptions of various bugs and bugfixes, including the above two, have now been included in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bugfixes/BUGREPORTS

• 24 Dec 2004: Installation scripts generalised, and Linux Poplog re-packaged

  The scripts for installing Linux poplog have been modified so as to cope better with more problems, e.g. gcc missing, or linking a new binary failed for some reason. In particular, short-cut installation procedures described here should work in more circumstances. (Thanks to Andrew Starling for reporting in detail problems experienced installing Poplog on SuSe 9.2).

  In addition, the rpms for Ctwm and Openmotif previously included in the package for the benefit of Birmingham students are no longer included since both are readily available on the internet and a later version of Openmotif is included in many Linux distributions. This has reduced the size of the integrated Birmingham Linux Poplog package from about 21Mbytes to about 19Mbytes.

• 24 Dec 2004: External linker bug fixed

  After the latest version of the popvision library (see 7 Dec 2004 news item) was installed a bug in the linux version of Pop11's external linker was discovered: it did not treat symbols in external libraries as global. Thanks to help from David Young and Jeff Best, the source of the problem has been identified and a fix installed. The latest version of Linux Poplog packaged with Birmingham and Sussex extras includes the fix, as does the latest 'core' linux poplog package.

• 24 Dec 2004: Script for Checking Linux installations provided

  As many people have recently had problems installing poplog on linux installations that did not include development tools by default (e.g. SuSe version 9.2) a script has now been provided for checking (and if possible) fixing Linux installations before installing Poplog.

• 7 Dec 2004: New version of David Young's Popvision library available.
  popvision.tar.gz
  Browsable directory
  New features all described in the HELP POPVISION file and other documentation files, include:

  • Linear algebra package
    LAPACK gives a direct interface to the Lapack linear algebra package, (and BLAS library) which has very wide scope.
    LAPOP gives a simpler, higher-level interface to some common linear algebra functions, including matrix multiplication, linear equations, least-squares problems, eigenvalue and singular value decompositions.
  • ARRPACK provides procedures for arithmetic and logical operations on arrays, using external procedures for efficiency. (Largely supersedes the FLOAT_ARRAYPROCS library).
  • New Array operations include
    * newintarray creates packed integer arrays.
    * newdfloatarray creates double-precision packed floating-point arrays.
    * newrfloatarray creates packed floating-point arrays with precision depending on popdprecision.
    * newcfloatarray creates complex single-precision packed floating-point arrays with alternating real and imaginary parts.
    * newzfloatarray creates complex double-precision packed floating-point arrays with alternating real and imaginary parts.
  • Image structure operations extended, including
    * corners_hs implements the Harris-Stephens corner detector.
    * snakes implements very simple adaptive contours.
  • External language interface
    * excall allows external functions to be passed the addresses of arbitrary elements of vectors.

    NOTE: the popvision library was re-built on 24th December 2004, following fixing of the external linker bug mentioned above. If you have installed the latest core linux Poplog version (24 December 2004 or later) with the linker bug mentioned above fixed, and you obtained popvision before then, you are advised to fetch the latest version of popvision and install it. To take full advantage of some parts of it you will need to have the Lapack and Blas libraries installed, available from http://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ac/ready/

• 26 Nov 2004: Poplog for FreeBSD Andrew Rydz has provided a port of Poplog for FreeBSD, and John Duncan has provided a Note on DragonFly BSD.

• 25 Oct 2004: 1976 Technical report on Nonlin now available

• 24 Oct 2004: Eliza in Pop-11 passed the 10,000 questions mark during October 2004, about two years after it was installed.

• 20 Oct 2004 Poplog for MAC+OSX

  As announced on the comp.lang.pop news group, Linux Poplog is being ported to Apple Mac+OSX. It is expected that this will be ready for use by the end of 2004. As a first step, Poplog has been ported to Darwin on PC. Testers and helpers are invited to look at the files here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/darwin+pc/

• 10 Oct 2004 Added links to online version of Gazdar and Mellish books on Natural Language Processing (in Pop11, Prolog and Lisp).

• 17 May 2004 Instructions added for Installing Poplog in FreeBSD

• 24 Apr 2004 Poplog packaged for Debian users

• 20 Apr 2004: Additional movie demo

  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/simagent

• 16 Mar 2004: Linux Poplog no longer requires termcap.
  Following discussion on comp.lang.pop of problems installing Poplog on linux distributions that do not include termcap, the Linux version of Poplog has been revised to remove reliance on termcap. Consequently, the easy install version of PC Linux Poplog with Birminham extensions should now be much simpler to install on recent versions of systems that do not include termcap e.g. Mandrake, SuSe.

• 15 Feb 2004: Added pointer to David Young's Poplog page at Sussex.

• 7 Feb 2004: The Online Eliza Chatbot in Pop-11 had answered over 6000 questions by early February 2004.

• 30 Jan 2004: New movies showing SimAgent capabilities now available.

• 17 Jan 2004: Information about OpenPoplog at Sourceforge

• 16 Nov 2003: HP Unix Poplog V15.53 provided by Waldek Hebisch

This file is accessible as either

1. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
2. ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html

Note: "POPLOG" is a trade mark of the University of Sussex.

Poplog was developed in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex and at ISL (now part of SPSS), and is distributed free of charge by courtesy of both organisations.

Additional code and documentation listed below were produced by members of the University of Birmingham and other organisations. All of it is now free of charge with open source.

Copyright Notice

Overview

Readers who know nothing about the Poplog system or its languages may find it useful to look at this introductory overview http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.info.html and also the comp.lang.pop newsgroup informal FAQ. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/comp.lang.pop.faq.html

Experts may find it useful to look at the draft User Guide to get a feel for the variety of facilities available in poplog.

See also http://www.poplog.org a site set up by two experienced users of Poplog and Pop-11. It includes archives of postings to comp.lang.pop, code libraries, and a partial mirror of this site, among other things.

• Use Google to find information about Poplog/Pop-11/Ved
• Information about Poplog and Pop-11
  
• The free Poplog distribution directory
  
• Installation notes and copyright notice
  
• News Items

CURRENT VERSIONS FOR LINUX AND UNIX

• PC Linux Poplog
  • Linux Poplog for use with or without Motif on PC Linux
  • Linux Poplog packaged with Birmingham and Sussex extras
    
• Poplog packaged for Debian users
• Installing Poplog in FreeBSD
  
• A reduced version of Poplog for mini-linux
  
• Sparc Solaris Poplog
  
• Alpha Unix Poplog V15.53
  
• HP Unix Poplog V15.53
  

• Intel Solaris Poplog
  
• Alpha Unix Poplog V15.5
  
• Poplog for AIX on Power PC
  

PC POPLOG FOR WINDOWS 95/98/2000, NT, XP etc.

• Poplog Version 15.5 for Windows
• Poplog Version 15.53 for Windows
• Additional utilities supplied by PCwin users
• Bham extras PCwin Poplog users
• Source files for PC Windows/NT Poplog

• BIRMINGHAM EXTENSIONS, FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH
• VED-LIKE INTERFACE FOR EMACS USERS
  
• BUGREPORTS AND BUGFIXES DIRECTORY

• MAN files, startup scripts and User Guide
  
• Browsable Poplog Documentation (Pop-11, Prolog, Lisp, ML)
  
• Porting and rebuilding information
  
• The browsable Pop-11 Primer (and other versions)

• A "bundled" package to mirror the Birmingham installation.
  
• The RCLIB and RCMENU X-based user-extendable graphical interface tools
  
• The SimAgent toolkit, including Poprulebase
  
• David Young's "Popvision" Library including neural net, array manipulation, and linear algebra utilities.
  
• David Young's Poplog page at Sussex
  
• An older collection of neural net utilities.
  
• Matthias Scheutz' Simworld package
  
• The Scheme in Pop system
  
• Austin Tate's Nonlin planning system
  
• An Eliza Chatbot in Pop-11
  
• Additional utilities (e.g. patterns, news, latex email)
• Browsable code and documentation/teaching directories
• The book Computers and Thought by Mike Sharples and others is available online here:
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.info.html#ctbook

• The POPEXTRAS package
• The bham-linux-poplog package

THE CONTRIB DIRECTORY

• The www.poplog.org site
• Information for mirror sites
• OpenPoplog at Sourceforge

• Other Free Software Sites

Use Google to search for information about Poplog or Pop-11

What is POPLOG?

For many years Poplog was an expensive commercial product, first sold commercially by Sussex University for use on VAX+VMS (for UK£3,000) in 1982, and then continually developed, ported to other platforms, and commercially supported up to 1998, first by Systems Designers (from 1983) and later by a spin-off, Integral Solutions Ltd (founded in 1989). At one stage the commercial price was UK£7,500 (+VAT) for workstations, though the educational price was always much lower. Poplog was a solid, reliable, commercial product, used mainly, though not entirely, for AI research, development and teaching. By about 1992 sales had exceeded $5,000,000.

For more information about the history of Poplog and its core language Pop-11 see the poplog.info.html file, mentioned above.

Site for free downloadable version

Some older versions listed below are also now available free of charge. (They may be brought up to date later if facilities become available for rebuilding them.)

V15.53 (produced in July 1999) included some additions to support recent versions of Linux, and a few minor bugfixes. Apart from that it was the same as the commercial version, used world-wide in the Clementine data-mining system.

Since then Poplog has undergone some development and bug-fixes. New versions have been made available at the Birmingham Poplog site, and are announced elsewhere in this file. An older version, Poplog Version 15.5 was made available for use on Windows, but lacking the graphical capabilities available in poplog on Linux, Unix and VMS systems. The OpenPoplog project at Sourceforge aims to remove the difference.

Reduced versions supporting Pop-11 as a scripting language may become available later, e.g. at www.poplog.org.

As explained below, A directory for bugreports and "bugfixes" has been set up for corrections to library and documentation files.

Coordination of further development work is managed through the comp.lang.pop newsgroup and the pop-forum email list. There is also a more specialised email for those who wish to be involved in detailed technical discussions of development work. If you wish to join the poplog-dev email list write to A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk.

The free Poplog distribution directory

There is a specially packaged, easy install version of Poplog for PC+Linux.

Information about Poplog for Windows is available.

A mirror site for Poplog, with some additional packages is at http://www.poplog.org.

Installation notes and Copyright notice:

The copyright notice is available in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/copyright.html

A draft User Guide is available.

To make installation easier, some sample scripts for installing packages and building saved images are in the image-scripts directory, packaged in the file image-scripts.tar.gz

Documentation on rebuilding poplog can be found in sysdoc/rebuilding.

Utilities to help with re-linking or rebuilding will go in the tools/ subdirectory, including a script which will be useful if you have difficulties re-linking unix versions of poplog.

A shell script for installing "local extensions" received as gzipped tar files is available here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/com/install_package and documented here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/tools/install_package/install_package.txt

DOWNLOADABLE VERSIONS OF POPLOG

Current versions of Poplog for Linux and Unix:

• Versions of Poplog for Linux on Intel or AMD (x86) PCs

  This is Poplog for linux on PC (Intel or AMD)
  Linux Poplog has been tested on RedHat Linux 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, Fedora core 1 and 2, and various versions of debian, Slackware, Mandrake, Suse Linux, and freeBSD but probably works on several more.

  Poplog has a wide range of graphical facilities that work in connection with the X window system on linux and unix platforms. These can be enhanced by the use of Motif though they are not essential for poplog. Motif provides a collection of additional graphical tools used by menus and scroll-bars in the poplog X-based editor XVed, though XVed can be used without them. The propsheet library for building graphical interfaces in poplog depends on motif.

  However many Poplog graphical facilities can also work without motif. The Birmingham graphical toolkit, RCLIB, available as an add-on to poplog (described below) does not require motif, and provides menus, sliders, dials, and other GUI facilities. Because it is implemented in Pop-11 it is much easier to modify or extend than motif. It is also used for graphical displays in the SimAgent toolkit, demonstrated here.

  If your linux system does not include motif, you should, if you wish, be able to use poplog with the free Openmotif version, now available from http://www.motifzone.net/download/ and also included in some linux distributions, e.g. RedHat. A slightly older version of Openmotif is available from http://www.metrolink.com/products/motif/index.html If those links fail try giving www.google.com or some other search engine the key "linux motif", or "openmotif".

  Lesstif used to be recommended as a free alternative to motif, but is no longer recommended, since OpenMotif is now available free of charge, and seems to work better with poplog than Lesstif.

  For a time, two versions of Poplog for linux+PC were made available, one linked for use with motif and one linked for use without. Linux Poplog is now distributed in a new format, as the Core package described below, with fewer pre-compiled binaries reducing download time. Installation scripts are provided which configure poplog to run with or without motif, as required.

  NOTE added 16 Mar 2004: PC linux poplog no longer requires termcap.

  Checking presuppositions for linux poplog.

  It may be worth checking presuppositions, by looking at this file to find out if you have motif properly installed. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/AREADME.motifcheck.txt

  Additional presuppositions may be included in this file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/AREADME.txt

  NOTE added 24 Dec 2004: CHECK_LINUX_FACILITIES script.

  A script that will detect some common missing features in linux installations, and can fix some simple cases (missing symbolic links) is here. You can download it, make it executable and run it to check your installation. If you run it as root it can install missing symbolic links in the /usr/X11R6/lib directory. Some recent versions of linux do not include gcc, which is required for linking poplog. The script cannot install gcc if it is not there. However, you may be able to install and run poplog without gcc, but you will not be able to recompile or relink it, e.g. if you install new X11 libraries.

  Poplog downloads for PC+Linux, Debian and instructions for FreeBSD follow.

  (Note that if the installation scripts provided in the tar packages do not work, you may have to do a more comprehensive rebuild, and for that purpose this shell script can be used, as a last resort: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/tools/relinking.linux.poplog Since 2003, Linux PC versions of poplog have included linking and installation scripts in the INSTALL subdirectory of the $usepop directory.

  • Recommended Linux Poplog Package
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz
    (Approx 19 Mbytes). This single compressed tar file contains everything listed in the linux-cd directory below. It was originally prepared for a CD for students and others wanting to duplicate the Birmingham Poplog setup.
    Instructions for installation are in these files included in the tar file and downloadable from here:

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/SHORT-CUT-INSTALLATION.txt
    Normally this guide provides sufficient information for an easy automated install process. The package includes two scripts which will install and link everything, one with and one without motif. It also sets up a sub-directory with commands to test the installation. (Tested on various versions of RedHat linux.)

    Additional information
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/AREADME.txt
    This provides more detailed information.

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/INSTALL-FROM-CD.txt
    Intended for people who have the bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz file (above) either on a CD or downloaded from the web.

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/INSTALL-FROM-WEB-FILES.txt
    Intended for people who wish to select and download individual files instead of the full 19 Mbyte package.

  • Core PC linux Poplog System
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/linux-pc-1553.tar.gz
    This is a symbolic link to the latest version of the core linux-pc poplog version 15.53 package. E.g. it could be a link to linux-pc-1553f, in case the latest version is 15.53f.
    It is a compact package (about 9.8 Mbytes) without saved images. Installation scripts are included in the INSTALL sub-directory for building poplog either with or without motif and then creating the saved images required by users.
    For most people it is better to get the "Recommended" package mentioned above, which also includes the above Core tar file.

  • Minimal 'complete' PC linux system
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/linux-poplog.tar.gz
    (about 12.4 Mbytes) This includes the above Core PC linux poplog tar file, along with some additional utilities that are constantly in use in Birmingham, including graphical and other facilities, with appropriate installation scripts. It includes the bham.tar.gz file mentioned below.

    This, in turn is included, with an even more comprehensive range of extensions to the Core poplog, in the above "Recommended" package for PC Linux poplog.

  • The linux-cd directory.
    This has a number of files for downloading to recreate the poplog environment used for teaching and research at Birmingham. One of the gzipped tar files described above as the "Minimal complete system" is included. This provides the Core version of linux poplog, combined with additional poplog facilities for AI teaching and research developed at Birmingham, Sussex and elsewhere, including the contents of the bham.tar.gz file mentioned below, making a total package.
    There are also separate links to several recommended optional extensions such as the popvision library, the SimAgent toolkit, the simworld package based on that, and a tutorial "Braitenberg" vehicles package using SimAgent.
    The linux-cd directory includes instructions in the file http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/INSTALL-FROM-WEB-FILES.txt

    The linux-cd directory also includes an OpenMotif rpm file, in case you don't have it. There are also additional Pop-11 GUI tools (rclib), an agent toolkit (Sim_agent), the Sussex popvision library, a package to enable Emacs users to use Poplog, the html version of the pop-11 primer, and other things. They are available as separate downloads from the linux-cd directory. These are all described more fully below.

    For Birmingham staff and students the contents of this directory are included on a CD available from the School of Computer Science Library. A tar file containing all of the contents of the linux-cd directory is available in the "Recommended" package mentioned above.

    If requested, I can produce a "split" version for downloading in pieces. (Email A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk ).

    The popextras package below allows the same collection of extra facilities to be added to a running poplog system, e.g. for solaris poplog users who wish to replicate the Birmingham poplog environment.
    

  • Debian Poplog:
    A version of the PC+Linux Poplog with Birmingham extras has been packaged for Debian users by Brent Fulgham. For further information see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/debian
    The downloadable package is http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/debian/poplog_15.53e-1_i386.deb (about 23.8 Mbytes)

  • Installing Poplog in FreeBSD
    John Duncan has provided instructions on installing the linux poplog package on PC running FreeBSD. See
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freebsd

  • A reduced version of Poplog for mini-linux on Intel or AMD (x86) PCs produced by Stephen Isard in Edinburgh. (Updated November 2003).
    The file on this site gives information about the system, but the ftp site for the system is in Edinburgh.

• Non linux versions

  • for Solaris on Sparc.

    This works on Solaris 2.6, and, Solaris 7 and Solaris 8, and probably also on older versions. It does not (yet) support 64bit addresses.

  • Poplog version 15.53 for Digital Unix on Alpha (64-bit version)

    This file includes binaries that work on recent versions of Digital unix (e.g. V4.0E (rev 1091)). It should also work on older versions of Digital Unix. For later versions re-linking may be necessary.

  • Poplog for HP Architecture running HP Unix, i.e. HP 712 running HP-UX 9.05

    This package was built by Waldek Hebisch at the Institute of Mathematics in Wrocaw Poland by cross-compiling poplog from the pc+linux version.
    It was copied by A.Sloman from Waldek Hebisch's Poplog page.

Older versions of Poplog:for unix-like systems

• Poplog version 15.52 for Solaris on Intel.
• Poplog version 15.50 for Digital Unix on Alpha (64-bit version)
• Poplog version 15.52 for AIX on Power Pc.

PC NT/XP/Windows versions of Poplog:

For those who do not wish to use Vmware the following options are now available.

• 1. A version of poplog 15.5 packaged for easy installation with a split-screen version of the Ved editor.

  This is available packaged in three formats:
  • pcwin15.5.zip (zip archive)
  • pcwin-15.5.tar.gz (gzipped tar file)
  • pcwin-15.5.tar (tar file) These are all the same version of Poplog Version 15.5 for Intel PC running NT or Windows 95/98/2000, packaged slightly differently for downloading. The source files for Windows Poplog version 15.5 are available here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/pcwnt-sources.tar.gz

    This version of Poplog has no graphics, no support for X, and only the "dumb-terminal" version of the editor VED (allowing split-window use). It was designed primarily for use with NT, but can work with Win95/98/2000, and probably later versions of windows (e.g. XP).

    The installation instructions are in the README file, included in the package, and copied here.

    Eventually this version of Windows poplog will be replaced by a system being developed in the OpenPoplog Project.

• 2. A later version of Poplog for windows, version 15.53

  • http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/winpop/pop15-53.zip A zip file containing the whole system.
  • http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/winpop/pop15-53/ The browsable unzipped directory.

  Novices may find the more conveniently packaged version 15.5 windows poplog (listed above) easier to install and use.

  The V15.53 poplog package for windows includes all the sources and I believe the "stubs" that were used in the Clementine data mining package to link to an X window emulation running windows NT. Perhaps a windows expert can use this to add graphics to windows poplog, or even make XVed work under windows?

  This newer version of windows poplog does not include a self-installation file providing a desktop shortcut that starts up the Ved editor. If anyone is able to package it so that it can be used by novices, like the older version above, please inform A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk

  Work is in progress on developing a more complete version of poplog to run under Windows. See the Open Poplog project. This should make all the X window facilities in linux/unix poplog available also under Windows.

  Please post queries, reports on how it works, or offers of help to the comp.lang.pop newsgroup (or to pop-forum AT cs.bham.ac.uk).

• 3. Additional utilities supplied by PCwin users

  for the benefit of other users of PC Windows Poplog can be found in this directory http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/winpop

• 4. Bham extras packaged for PCwin users

  Additional Pop-11 and Ved utilities and AI teaching materials developed at Birmingham and packaged for Windows/NT users in a zip file: bhamteach.zip
  This contains AI tutorial files, help files and supporting libraries produced mainly at Birmingham for teaching programming and elementary AI, including some Ved tutorials. Some of these are updated versions of the teach files and libraries distributed with Poplog. Additional information about this collection is below.

• 5. Source files for PC NT/Windows version of Poplog

  The sources for the older PC Windows/NT Poplog version 15.5 are available separately: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/pcwnt-sources.tar.gz
  The sources for PC Windows/NT Poplog version 15.53 are included in the windows poplog version 15.53 files here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/winpop/
  NB: Windows Poplog was originally developed for NT and not all features are fully supported on Win95/98.

VED-LIKE INTERFACE FOR EMACS USERS

A number of Emacs users have developed a package that supports similar use of Pop-11 and other Poplog languages from Emacs, and includes utilities for reading the Ved "graphics enhanced" documentation files. The package can be downloaded here: emacs.tar.gz or browsed online here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/emacs/
This is already included in the larger "complete" packages.

BUGREPORTS AND BUGFIXES

Asking for help or submitting bug reports

DOCUMENTATION DIRECTORIES

MAN Files, Startup Scripts and User Guide

The Draft User Guide, will give experienced programmers an idea of the contents of Poplog. It shows how to start up Poplog running one or more language compilers possibly with additional saved images, either starting in the editor or talking directly to a compiler. It is partly derived from the "man" file originally distributed with Poplog, and is now the basis for the recommended man file for local installation. The User Guide can be inspected here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup/man/man1/poplog.html

The whole "setup" directory, including User Guide, man files, sample user startup scripts and copyright notice can be fetched in this file: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup.tar.gz

Browsable Poplog Documentation (Pop-11, Prolog, Lisp, ML, and Rebuilding poplog)

Detailed system documentation for Poplog, Pop-11 and the other Poplog languages (Prolog, Common Lisp, and Standard ML), can be found in the doc/ subdirectory.

All the contents of this directory are also available in a gzipped tar file

See especially the system documentation directory for Poplog and Pop-11 doc/popref/.

The documentation files in the doc/ subdirectory have had all the special VED graphic characters removed, so they should be readable in any browser.

The Poplog implementation of Common Lisp is compatible with Steele's book CLTL2. For missing ANSI Lisp features see doc/lisphelp/bugs

The Birmingham local directories included in the doc/ directory (bhamteach and bhamhelp) contain some online teaching material for an introductory AI programming course, and other things. The bhamteach.tar.gz file mentioned below includes code and documentation. (For windows users it is bhamteach.zip)

Porting and rebuilding information

The complete sysdoc directory is available as a gzipped tar file http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/sysdoc.tar.gz

The browsable Pop-11 Primer (and other versions)

Or a chm file for reading in a microsoft windows help browser, kindly converted by Michael Malien.

CHM files (Compiled HTML files) are explained at http://www.techscribe.co.uk/techw/compiled_html.htm and at this Microsoft web site
Nils Valentin kindly informed me that a tool for extracting html files from a chm file is obtainable here http://66.93.236.84/~jedwin/projects/chmlib/
Instructions for compiling and using the chmlib package are available here: http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/31/OpenOfficeConverters.pdf
However, for users of linux/unix systems it will normally be more convenient to fetch one of the other packaged versions of the primer.

There are also other versions of the primer available:

• primer.gz
  Plain text version Pop-11 Primer (Included as teach file with Poplog V15.53)
• primer.ps.gz
  Postscript version of Pop-11 primer. (Ask for PDF if preferred.)
• primer2.ps.gz
  Postscript version of primer printing two pages per A4 sheet. primer.tex.gz
  
• Latex source of postscript version of primer. Also requires one .eps file for a diagram of the Poplog virtual machine, available here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popmodel.eps

A "bundled" package to mirror the Birmingham installation.

That is included, along with more packages the larger downloads for installing linux poplog. A medium-sized package for people who already have poplog but not the Birmingham extensions is in the 'popextras' package.

The RCLIB and RCMENU X-based user-extendable graphical interface tools.

• rclib.tar.gz The RCLIB (relative coordinates) extension to Pop-11 X window based graphics, using the Poplog widget set to provide tools for graphical interfaces without using motif. This can be used with all X window based versions of Poplog including the Linux version whether motif is or is not available.

  RCLIB can be browsed online in this directory: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/ See the help/ and teach/ subdirectories, especially help/rclib.

  Examples of displays produced by the "RCLIB" Graphic Library can be found in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/rclib/
  An overview (plain text) file is here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/help/rclib
  

• rcmenu.tar.gz Provides Pop-11 utilities based on RCLIB, for creating autoloadable "stay up" and "pop up" menus and control panels, (Does not use any motif facilities, and does not require the Pop-11 "propsheet" mechanisms to work.)
  This package is basically tailored to provide help for students in Birmingham, especially when learning to use the editor. However it is very easily modified to suit different sites, or users.

  The default set of autoloadable menus can be browsed in the rcmenu/menus/ subdirectory. These menu-definition files show the syntax available for specifying environments.

  
  An earlier, less versatile, version of this package, based on propsheet and motif, is in the menu.tar.gz file listed below.

The SimAgent toolkit, including Poprulebase

Some movies showing some of the features of SimAgent are here (with thanks to Mike Lees at Nottingham for the Boids and Tileworld examples): http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/simagent/

For a detailed overview of the toolkit see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cogaff/simagent.html and the slide presentation using PDF or Postscript at: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/draft/toolkit.pdf
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/draft/toolkit.ps

The toolkit is now included in the Birmingham Linux Poplog package. bug can also be downloaded separately:

• The SimAgent Toolkit as described in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cogaff/simagent.html including Poprulebase and Sim_agent libraries. Needs RCLIB (above).
  Can be installed using the install_package script

  Poprulebase is a highly extendable production system interpreter used in the SimAgent toolkit, including support for interactions between symbolic and sub-symbolic mechanisms. It can also be used alone as an Expert System Shell.

  Poprulebase code and documentation can be browsed online in subdirectories of the newkit/prb/ directory, e.g. tutorial and reference documentation is in the teach/ and help/ subdirectories.

  The SimAgent specific code and documentation files can be browsed in the newkit/sim/ directory. Tutorial and reference documentation is in the teach/ and help/ subdirectories.
  A summary of the main changes to SimAgent (and Poprulebase) introduced in the summer of 1999 can be found in the help/newkit file
  An example SimAgent tutorial file is newkit/sim/teach/sim_feelings

• oldprb.tar.gz Poprulebase (version 4.0),
• oldsim.tar.gz The SimAgent toolkit (version 4.0) (requires old version of poprulebase and also RCLIB).

David Young's Popvision library

An overview of the teaching materials in the popvision package is available here http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/davidy/teachvision/vision0.html
The programs work fast because there's a mixture of Pop-11 and C. The package includes scripts for compiling the C sources on solaris, linux and alpha Unix systems. The programs and documentation can be browsed online in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision
(See especially the popvision/help/* files -- though you may have slight problems with the "VED graphic" characters in a Web browser.)

The whole package can be fetched from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision.tar.gz

This also includes David Young's teaching material on on multi-layer perceptrons.

The Array manipulation and Linear Algebra Packages in Popvision

The Popvision package includes three new libraries (added in 2004) that make available a very rich collection of array manipulation facilities and mathematical facilities including the BLAS and LAPACK linear algebra packages, all now accessible interactively from pop11.

• The ARRPACK package

  This provides an array processing package for Pop-11. It includes efficient procedures (implemented in C) to carry out arithmetic and logical operations on elements of real and complex arrays. A whole array or a subset of its elements may be processed in a single procedure call. ARRPACK is restricted to operations in which each array element is treated separately from other elements of the same array, such as the element-by-element addition of two arrays. (Operations where each element is processed along with its neighbours, such as convolution, Fourier transforms and matrix operations, are provided by other libraries.) A higher-level interface to these procedures may be provided in future.

• The LAPACK and LAPOP libraries

  These libraries provide Pop11 interfaces to BLAS and LAPACK
  • http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html
    The BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) are high quality "building block" routines for performing basic vector and matrix operations. Level 1 BLAS do vector-vector operations, Level 2 BLAS do matrix-vector operations, and Level 3 BLAS do matrix-matrix operations. Because the BLAS are efficient, portable, and widely available, they're commonly used in the development of high quality linear algebra software, LINPACK and LAPACK for example.

  • http://www.netlib.org/lapack/
    LAPACK is written in Fortran77 and provides routines for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, least-squares solutions of linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, and singular value problems. The associated matrix factorizations (LU, Cholesky, QR, SVD, Schur, generalized Schur) are also provided, as are related computations such as reordering of the Schur factorizations and estimating condition numbers. Dense and banded matrices are handled, but not general sparse matrices. In all areas, similar functionality is provided for real and complex matrices, in both single and double precision.
  Anyone who wants all this but does not have blas and lapack for linux (apparently included in some linux distributions --e.g. redhat 9) can get rpms for various architectures from http://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ac/ready/

The popvision tar file can be installed using the install_package script, which will untar the package into the directory $poplocal/local/ where it will create $poplocal/local/popvision/ with appropriate sub-directories, and also $poplocal/local/lib/popvision.p for easy access using the Pop-11 command uses popvision;

David Young's Pop11 Libraries at Sussex

• External function call with vector-offset arguments. (excall: library - now included in the popvision package.)
• Extensions to Ved to speed up editing HTML (not an HTML previewer - but able to save you a lot of keystrokes if you edit HTML source)
• A Boyer-Moore-type algorithm for fast string searching. Sometimes very much faster than standard string searching, though not in fact optimal.
• A permutation generator.

An older neural net library

The package can be fetched from ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/neural.tar.gz
It can be installed using the install_package script

The Simworld package

See also http://www.nd.edu/~airolab/

The PopScheme System (Scheme implemented in Pop-11)

There are two formats for downloading,

• Scheme.tar.gz
• Scheme.zip

The second one will probably be easier to install on Windows, but I have not checked that this package works in Windows poplog.

If in doubt check out the version at Umass, described in ftp://www-edlab.cs.umass.edu/pub/cs287/README

Robin Popplestone's lecture notes on programming paradigms are also available here.

Robin,was one of the original designers of the language that first became widely known as POP2, on which Pop-11 was based. He retired from Umass a couple of years ago and moved back to Scotland, so I don't know how much longer the files at Umass will remain available.

Austin Tate's Nonlin planning system

Austin has put a lot of effort into making it run as it used to in a much earlier version of Poplog, so that it works in both Windows poplog and Linux/Unix poplog (but not yet in the Poplog editor Ved, as it expects to interact directly with the terminal).

Further information is here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/AREADME.txt

If you wish to play with Nonlin, fetch the zip file. Instructions and historical information regarding Nonlin, including a review of the package, are in the http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/readme.txt file.

Further information, including sample problem domain definitions using the Nonlin task formalism (TF) can be found in these directories:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/nonlin
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/nonlin/tf/

Nonlin is also available in Edinburgh here: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/

The original 1976 technical report defining Nonlin has been scanned in and is now available as a PDF file (6.75Mbytes).

Tate, A. (1976) "Project Planning Using a Hierarchic Non-linear Planner", D.A.I. Research Report No. 25, August 1976, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.

Further information can be found by giving "nonlin+planner" to google.

An Online Eliza Chatbot in Pop-11

A teach file introducing students to the task of building their own version of Eliza in Pop-11 can be found here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/teach/respond

A different design, produced by Riccardo Poli, for a potentially much more sophisticated Eliza, because it can maintain and manipulate arbitrary memories of its interactions in the Poprulebase database, can be found in the middle of this introduction to Poprulebase http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/newkit/prb/teach/rulebase

OTHER PACKAGES

CORE BIRMINGHAM EXTENSIONS FOR TEACHING (bhamteach)

A collection of teaching files, help files, autoloadable utilities and demonstration libraries is available packaged for the convenience of Birmingham AI students who wish to duplicate the teaching environment on their own machines running Poplog.

There are two bundles available

• bhamteach.tar.gz (for unix/linux users)
  Now included in the more comprehensive bham.tar.gz
• bhamteach.zip (for windows/NT users)

The package provides AI tutorial files, help files and supporting libraries produced mainly at Birmingham for teaching programming and elementary AI, including some Ved/Xved tutorials. Some of these are updated versions of the teach files and libraries distributed with Poplog.

It includes the pattern prefix "!" which allows the Pop-11 pattern matcher to be used with lvars variables (lexical locals). The complete list of contents can be found here. The Pop-11 code files and the documentation files can be browsed online.

WARNING

Most of these revised versions of old files were developed at Birmingham before Poplog became available free of charge, and were not incorporated into the standard distribution. Consequently if installed they will often "shadow" the "standard" versions, and this can cause confusion. Some of the files come from Sussex University, not Birmingham and are made available with permission of the authors.

It is hoped that if resources become available later, the revised versions will be merged with the standard files and the distributed packages rebuilt.

NOTE for PC users:

SOME ADDITIONAL BROWSABLE DIRECTORIES

The Pop-11 and AI teaching and documentation files included in the bhamteach tar package can be browsed online in these directories:

• teach/ (Teach files)
• help/ (Help files)
• auto/ (Autoloadable libraries)
• lib/ (Non-autoloadable libraries)

There are other online browsable files included in various packages some of which, though not all, are mentioned elsewhere in this file. E.g.

• rclib/ the RCLIB teach, help, auto and lib files, illustrated here
• rcmenu the RCMENU extension to RCLIB, which makes possible the autoloadable "menu" definitions in this directory rcmenu/menus/.
• newkit/prb/ the Poprulebase teach, help, auto and lib files.
• newkit/sim/ the SimAgent teach, help, auto and lib files.
• popvision/ the Popvision libraries (from David Young at Sussex University)
• neural/ some neural net facilities (includes C programs linked to pop-11)
• string_ops/ String manipulation utilities provided by Steve Leach.
• ved_latex/ Latex tutorial and some utilities for producing and previewing latex files in Ved.
• xml-dist/ Package by Steve Leach which he says "..allows you to seamlessly interleave Pop11 and XML. The combination is really quite powerful. Using it I am able to get results in a few minutes where people using Perl/CPAN are taking weeks". The whole package is also downloadable in a gzipped tar file xml-dist.tar.gz

ADDITIONAL UTILITIES (E.G. PATTERNS, NEWS, LATEX EMAIL)

• pattern.tar.gz
  An extension to the Pop-11 pattern matcher to support lexically scoped pattern variables. (This is included in the bham.teach.tar.gz file, and in the poprulebase package.)
• ved_latex.tar.gz
  Latex tutorial and utilities (for driving Latex from inside Ved)
• vedgn.tar.gz
  Ved-based utilities for reading and posting net news.
• vedmail.tar.gz
  Ved-based utilities for sending, reading and replying to email.
• menu.tar.gz
  Now superseded: This is an earlier version of the rcmenu.tar.gz package, above. Provides some motif-based Pop-11 utilities for creating menus and control panels, (Uses the Pop-11 "propsheet" library.)
  Because this requires motif libraries, it will not run on Linux systems without either motif or lesstif. So use rcmenu.tar.gz instead. Only the latter will be developed from now on.

EASY TO INSTALL COMPLETE PACKAGES

• The POPEXTRAS package
  This tar file contains a subset of the bham-linux-poplog file (described below). It is available for installation AFTER you have fetched and installed a version of Poplog suited to your machine. It can be fetched in the popextras.tar file. (Just over 8Mbytes initially, but likely to grow as new offerings are provided by users elsewhere.)
  The popextras.tar file contains some installation scripts, a README file and most of the optional "add-ons" mentioned above, i.e:
  bhamteach.tar.gz, contrib.tar.gz, emacs.tar.gz, image-scripts.tar.gz, newkit.tar.gz, pattern.tar.gz, pophtmlprimer.tar.gz, popvision.tar.gz, rclib.tar.gz, rcmenu.tar.gz, setup.tar.gz, userfiles.tar.gz, ved_latex.tar.gz, vedgn.tar.gz, vedmail.tar.gz.

• The bham-linux-poplog package
  To make it easy to fetch a complete package containing PC linux Poplog, linked with motif, and a number of additional packages from Sussex and Birmingham (some of which will not work with PC windows Poplog) the following file is provided: bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz (approximately 10 Mbytes). Untar the file, and then read the instructions in the linux-poplog/AREADME.txt file.
  If you have a linux system that includes motif (with one of libXm.so, libXm.so.2, linXm.so.3 in the /usr/X11R6/lib/ directory then you can probably simply follow the 'short-cut' instructions.
  The package includes everything in the popextras package, as well as the the two linux poplog with motif tar.gz files.
  This tar file was created in order to install all the contents on a CD for distribution to Birmingham students. Others may also find it useful.
  NOTE The format of this file was changed on 1 Sep 2002. Previously it was called popcd.tar

GLOBAL OPEN SOURCE POPLOG LIBRARY (GOSPL) SITE

This contains a growing collection of contributed programs.

THE CONTRIB DIRECTORY

• Code examples the book by Gerald Gazdar and Chris Mellish on Natural Language Processing (including the Pop-11, Prolog and Common Lisp versions)
  The Original of the book is also online here, in three versions.
  • http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/research/nlp/gazdar/nlp-in-pop11/
  • http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/research/nlp/gazdar/nlp-in-prolog/
  • http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/research/nlp/gazdar/nlp-in-lisp/
• Pop-11 program examples from the book Computers and Thought by Mike Sharples and others. The full text of the book, though without the pictures is available online here:
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.info.html#ctbook
• Larry Paulson's book ML for the Working Programmer, along with some other ML programs.
• The book Artificial Intelligence Through Search by Chris Thornton and Benedict du Boulay.

RELATED POPLOG SITES

www.poplog.org

Information for mirror sites

OpenPoplog at Sourceforge

OTHER FREE SOFTWARE SITES

• thefreecountry.com: Free Programmers' Resources: free compilers, source code, programming tools, tutorials, and many other things.
  

  More to be added ....

Chronological Record of Contents

    ls -FglRt | gzip

Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

This file maintained in Lynx-friendly format by:
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/
Last Updated: 7 Jan 2005