School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
In collaboration with
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
The University of Sussex.

INFORMATION ABOUT POPLOG AND POP-11

 This file is
        ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/poplog.info.html
also accessible as
        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.info.html

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

Frames-free web site

What is POPLOG?

POPLOG is a free, open source, multi-language software development environment providing incremental compilers for a number of interactive programming languages, notably:

There is also an implementation of Scheme in Poplog available at the FreePoplog Site http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
This was developed by Robin Popplestone, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

Poplog provides support for multi-paradigm software development in a rapid prototyping environment, because of the use of (fast) incremental compilers for all the languages.

In Poplog, all the above languages compile to a common virtual machine, which is then compiled (incrementally) to the current host machine language. Users can add new languages or extend the existing languages because the compiler development tools are made available (in the form of Pop-11 procedures).

Poplog also includes a lot of X related facilities, an integrated multi-window programmable text editor (VED), and a host of teaching material and libraries provided in source. The system was developed mainly at Sussex University, but also at Integral Solutions Ltd (ISL) Now owned by SPSS (who sell the Clementine data-mining system developed in Poplog by ISL).

Getting Poplog and add-ons

The main distribution site for poplog is http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
(Mirrored at http://www.poplog.org, which also provides additional Poplog add-ons.)
This includes a number of packaged versions of Poplog of which the most popular is the version for linux+PC with extensions from Birmingham, in an easy-install bundle.

There are also various library extensions including

Some Poplog/Pop-11 History

Poplog grew out of the Pop-11 language produced at Sussex University building on the many excellent ideas in the Pop2 language, originally developed by Robin Popplestone (see below) and others at Edinburgh University in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At Sussex Pop-11 was implemented (mainly by Steve Hardy) to run on a PDP11/40 computer running Unix, round about 1976. It was later ported to a VAX running VMS, and John Gibson was the main architect thereafter. Around 1981-2 Chris Mellish implemented a version of Prolog in Pop-11, and the combined system was then called Poplog. A few years later a "toy" Lisp system was added by Jonathan Cunningham, and after that a full Common Lisp was implemented by John Williams, with supporting changes to the Poplog virtual machine produced by John Gibson. Later Robert Duncan and Simon Nichols added an implementation of Standard ML.

Poplog was originally sold to commercial and academic users (at very different prices!) by Sussex University (starting around 1982), when it contained only Pop-11 and Prolog (hence the name.)

SDL (Systems Designers Ltd) took over marketing in 1983 (and had a Poplog stand at IJCAI83 in Karlsruhe). Later, following a merger, SDL grew into SD-Scicon, one of the largest software companies in the UK, which later changed its name to SD, and then became EDS

In 1989 SD decided to pull out of the AI tools market and a small group of people in the company (about 6) who had been associated with Poplog bought out the Poplog business (and also the SD-prolog business) and started ISL. At first their business was mainly selling and supporting Poplog (while Sussex University remained closely involved in development). They also provided AI services, developed various kinds of AI software.

During the 1990s ISL developed and diversified, including producing the prize winning Clementine Data Mining System, which was originally implemented mainly in Pop-11, and still makes considerable use of Pop-11 (as do other systems produced by clients of ISL, e.g. COGSYS), and some products of Praxis.

As explained in ISL's web page, in December 1998 SPSS bought ISL (a friendly takeover) and following that, discussions began with Sussex regarding the future of Poplog. This eventually led to the Free Poplog site.

FREE POPLOG ONLINE

In July 1999 it was decided that the latest version of Poplog (V15.53) including sources for all supported hardware/operating system combinations, should be made available free of charge. For information about this see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html

There is a smaller out of date free version of Poplog (Version 15.01), which apparently still works on SUSE Linux, though not on other recent versions of Linux. It is available by ftp from Sussex University in the Sussex Linux Poplog distribution directory: ftp://ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk/pub/poplog/poplog15.0
This old version has some restrictions: it is memory-limited and you cannot create saved images. But most of the teaching material in older books on pop-11 can be used on it, though not the newer facilities at the Birmingham Poplog ftp site.

Platforms

Poplog has, at various times, run on a variety of Unix and VMS machines, including Sun, HP, SGI, DEC Alpha, DEC Vax, Sequent Symmetry, Apollo Unix, and PC running Redhat Linux v5.2 (and maybe other versions of Linux). There is also a Windows NT version of Poplog (e.g. used in Clementine on PCs) but without graphics, unless you purchase an X window system emulator for NT.

Sources of information about Poplog

Information at Sussex University

More detailed information about Pop-11, Poplog and the Poplog development team is available at Sussex: Poplog Information. Pop-11 information.

There is also an out of date poplog help file at Sussex.

Robin Popplestone's Poplog-based work at University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Many of the key ideas in Pop-11 were developed in the late 1960s by Robin Popplestone, first at Manchester University, then Edinburgh University. He moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986. His web page includes several papers relevant to the design of pop-11 and its history, especially Early development of the POP language and Functional and Interactive Computer Language Design

The WWW.POPLOG.ORG site

Graham Higgins and Steve Knight Leach, who both previously used Poplog while working at HP research labs, have set up http://www.poplog.org/, a Poplog information site, which includes poplog-related and Pop-11-related information, including archives of postings to comp.lang.pop going back to about 1992, and some useful pop-11 utility libraries.

There is a Poplog/Pop-11 FAQ and a port of the Babylon AI development environment to Poplog Common Lisp.

Steve Leach while working at HP contributed many ideas to Poplog development and designed and implemented the first version of Objectclass the most sophisticated Object Oriented extension to Pop-11 (there were several others). See the teach, help, and ref files in this directory http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/C.all/lib/objectclass WARNING The downloads of poplog installation packages at the www.poplog.org site may be out of date. It is best to try fetching poplog from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html first.

Information at Reading University

Another source of information can be found at Reading University

The comp.lang.pop newsgroup

There is a news group to which questions and comments about Pop-11, Poplog and the Poplog languages may be posted: comp.lang.pop. Information about the news group is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/comp.lang.pop.faq.html

The news group is gatewayed to an email list currently maintained at the University of Birmingham. If you wish to join the pop-forum email list, write to A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk

The FreePoplog Directory at the University of Birmingham

can be examined at: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/ or via FTP ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/
Most of the contents of the directory are described below and in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html There may be some additional information in the README file.

The directory contains code and documentation (mainly Pop-11) for use with Poplog developed at Birmingham (some of it extending work done at Sussex).

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.

Poplog/Pop-11 related code and documentation

The Birmingham local directories included in the FreePoplog directory contain a lot of online teaching material for an introductory AI programming course, a Ved-based net news reader, using the Pop-11 socket library, extensions to the Pop-11 RC_GRAPHIC library, and two libraries for design and development of "intelligent" agents. POPRULEBASE and SIM_AGENT. For an overview and demonstration (with movies) of the latter, see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/cog_affect/sim_agent.html

Examples of displays produced by the "RCLIB" (relative coordinates) 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

Fetching Birmingham utilities and teaching materials

Some of the Birmingham Pop-11 and AI teach files can be found in a convenient compressed tar file in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bhamteach.tar.gz

The Pop-11 primer

There is a Primer of pop-11 for experienced programmers now available in various formats in the FreePoplog directory including a version of the Primer in html.

The HTML version can be fetched in a tar file and unpacked for local use: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/pophtmlprimer.tar.gz
(The graphical symbols won't work, but they are inessential.)

The Computers and Thought book available online

An effective introductory book for absolute beginners in AI and Cognitive science is Computers and Thought by M.Sharples, D. Hogg, C. Hutchison, S. Torrance, D. Young, MIT Press (1989). This book relates AI to philosophy, psychology and linguistics, and includes programming examples in Pop-11,

It is available online (though without any of the diagrams alas) at

Natural language processing in Pop-11 available online

This book by Gerald Gazdar and Chris Mellish, originally published in 1989 by Addison Wesley, is available online here: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/local/books

OpenPoplog development project at Sourceforge

For further information see:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/openpoplog.html

This file is maintained by:
Aaron Sloman,
School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham
Email: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk

Last updated: 16 Apr 2004