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.

• Other versions

  See the section on ports in progress

Older versions of Poplog:for unix-like systems

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

PC NT/XP/Windows versions of Poplog:

At present (January 2010) the implementations of Poplog for Windows do not provide all the facilities of Linux/Unix poplog. In particular, they do not provide the Poplog graphical facilities that work on the X window system on Unix and Linux.

However it is possible to run Linux poplog within Windows using VirtualBox, as described here.

It is also possible to run linux poplog on Windows by using the free trial version of VMWARE http://www.vmware.com/. For instance the hybrid-sheepdog demonstration here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/simagent/ was produced by an MSc student using Linux PC poplog, under Vmware on a laptop running Windows XP.

It can also be made to work with the free 'andLinux' package along with Xming, as described here. (This information may be out of date. If so please let A.S. know.)

It is likely that increasing development of 'virtualisation' tools will make it much easier to run programs developed in one operating system on another.

The Open Poplog project aims to re-engineer poplog in a more platform-independent form eventually. However, that project seems to have been hit by the financial crash around 2008-2010.

For those users of Microsoft Windows who do not wish to use andLinux or VirtualBox or Vmware the following options are available -- but there is no guarantee that they still work (in 2020).

• 1. A version of Windows 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.
    David Brooks has provided instructions on how to install it on Windows (including Vista) here:

    It is hoped that eventually this version of Windows poplog will be replaced by a system being developed in the OpenPoplog Project.
    (Now defunct, apparently.)

• 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

  The Open Poplog project was intended to make all the X window facilities in linux/unix Poplog available also under Windows. Financial disruptions undermined that projct.

• 3. Additional utilities supplied by PC Windows Poplog users

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

• 4. Bham extras packaged for Windows 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 in a separate file.

• 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.

JUMP TO CONTENTS LIST

PORTS IN PROGRESS

• Helping with ports

  If you would like to help with testing and porting write to

  pop-forum AT cs.bham.ac.uk .

  You may also find it useful to look at the

  comp.lang.pop net news group

  
  See also the OpenPoplog initiative

• Porting Poplog to Mac+OSX on PPC

  Poplog on Intel Mac
  (Probably out of date!)
  Although there is a partial port of Poplog for Mac OSX on PPC, there isn't one for Intel-based Macs. For those, the best way to run poplog is now to install a version of linux (e.g. some have used 'archlinux because it is small) in a virtual operating system (e.g. using VMWare) and then to install and run the latest Linux poplog.

  Poplog on OSX
  As a first step towards the OSX port, Poplog was 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/

  Later a nearly working system for OSX was provided, which is accessible in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/osx/
  It was tested by a non-Mac user here and found to work, but the X window graphical facilities do not yet work. Perhaps this has something to do with dynamic libraries, and can be fixed by an OSX expert.

  Everything else seems to work. However the facilities for automatically rebuilding poplog have not been updated to run on OSX yet.

  An alternative is for an OSX user with X11 installed to run Poplog remotely on a linux or solaris machine running Poplog. For further information see this file.

• Poplog has also been ported to Linux on AMD 64-bit PC, but the old port has been replaced by the new 64-bit Poplog available here:
  http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/V16/AREADME.html

VED-LIKE INTERFACE FOR EMACS USERS

The Poplog system was built around the integrated editor Ved (implemented in Pop-11), which includes facilities for rapidly accessing help files, teaching documentation and library sources through "hypertext links", and for transferring commands to the incremental compiler(s) and reading output from the compilers into an editor buffer. This makes learning, development and testing very easy, especially for novice programmers.

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.

THE POPLOG PACKAGE STRUCTURE INTRODUCED IN VERSION 15.6 (2005)

Around January 2005 Poplog was reorganised. A sub-directory was introduced $usepop/pop/packages (with environment variable $poppackages to allow for its location to be changed).
Many of the extensions that had been available as special packages from Birmingham University, Sussex University, or elsewhere that had previously been separately down-loadable packages were moved into that directory, and some of the AI tutorial material that had been part of the core Pop-11 code and documentation libraries was moved into a 'teaching' package.

Each package has a top level directory containing a pop-11 program to extend the poplog search lists (popautolist, popuseslist, vedhelplist, vedteachlist, etc.) and subdirectories such as auto/, lib/, teach/, help/, ref/, data/ and others, if needed.

Some parts of poplog that were deemed not to be suitable for inclusion in the core of the system, e.g. items concerned with teaching AI rather than teaching programming in Pop-11 or Prolog, etc. were moved into the 'teaching' package.

NOTE: This process is not yet complete. The reorganisation will be continued, depending on available time.

The current default list of contents (in April 2007) is

lib: A directory containing links to the startup pop-11 file for each of the packages.
bhamlib: Extensions from the Birmingham $poplocal/local/directory
(Currently very little, as most of the original contents are now in other packages).
brait: A braitenberg simulator based on SimAgent
com: Some shell scripts used for poplog
contrib: Programs and documentation contributed over the years include portions of published books, e.g. the Computers and Thought book, and the Natural Language Processing books by Gazdar and Mellish. (No longer included: available separately.)
emacs:Utilities to make Emacs talk to the Poplog compilers, emulating the poplog Ved editor
lockfile: programs for locking and unlocking files
master: Relics of the Sussex mechanisms for managing file headers and footers.
neural: The poplog neural library, providing some neural net functions implemented in C and invoked from Pop-11
newc_dec: Information provided by Anthony Worrall about extensions to the mechanisms for loading external libraries written in C.
newkit: The Birmingham SimAgent toolkit, containing Poprulebase and SimAgent libraries, and also making heavy use of RCLIB for graphics.
package_template: Template directory for constructing a new package.
popmatlab: A 'virtual' package which makes visible a subset of the facilities included in the popvision package, providing general purpose mathematical tools that are not restricted to being used for vision, including the well known BLAS and LAPACK toolkits, which are here made available from Pop-11.
popvision: David Young's Popvision library (including many C programs for image manipulation invoked from Pop-11). This includes the 'popmatlab' library.
prb: The Poprulebase subset of SimAgent, which can be used on its own, e.g. for expert systems.
rclib: The RCLIB graphical extension to Pop-11 illustrated here.
rcmenu: An extension to RCLIB providing the 'recursive hypermenu' package.
sim: The sim_agent library extensions, to be added to Poprulebase to provide the SimAgent toolkit.
teaching: AI teaching materials -- programs and documentation.
vedgn: An extension to the Ved editor for reading news (usenet).
vedlatex: Extensions to the Ved editor for use with LaTex.
vedmail: Programs for reading mail in a standard unix mail file, for sending mail, replying, unpacking attachments, creating and sending attachments, etc. All written in pop-11.
vedutils: Extensions to the Ved editor used in Birmingham.

---

OTHER THINGS IN THE SAME DIRECTORY
gz: A directory for tar files containing packages supplied in compressed form only.
install_package: A shell script for unpacking and installing packages from tar files of the form package.tar.gz into a directory package
make_tarfiles: Shell script for creating tar files from the currently installed packages.
setup: various startup scrips

BUGREPORTS AND BUGFIXES

Bugfixes are recorded in this directory tree. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bugfixes/
The BUGREPORTS file lists bugs and fixes (where available) in reverse chronological order. The file ALLFILES file lists all the files in the bugfixes directory, in reverse chronological order.

Other changes are listed in the CHANGES.txt file now included with poplog, along with revision notes included source code and library files.

Asking for help or submitting bug reports

Please submit bugreports to the comp.lang.pop newsgroup or the pop-forum email list, not to any individual. Before submitting a report on a problem it is worth looking at this form for bugreports. Following the instructions will make it more likely that someone can help you.

JUMP TO CONTENTS LIST

DOCUMENTATION DIRECTORIES

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

• The downloadable Poplog system includes several documentation directories, for Pop-11, for Prolog, for Common Lisp, for ML, for teaching, and also documentation directories associated with each of the packages in $usepop/pop/packages.

• Most of the detailed system documentation for Poplog, Pop-11 and the other Poplog languages (Prolog, Common Lisp, and Standard ML), can also be found in the browsable doc/ subdirectory on this web site.

• 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 Reading Poplog Online web site contains much of that material conveniently accessible in html format, maintained at Reading University by Anthony Worrall. Anthony's code for converting Poplog documentation to html is here. (I have not tried using it.)

• Musings on Dr Dobb's CodeTalk Mar 11 2009 about Poplog, continuations, Pop-11, Eliza, AI education, and Prolog. by Jocelyn Paine (Oxford). Also available here.

• The Poplog implementation of Common Lisp with additional documentation here, is compatible with most of ANSI Common Lisp documented in Guy L. Steele's book Common Lisp The Language (CLTL2) For missing ANSI Lisp features see doc/lisphelp/bugs

• Documentation on the Poplog Prolog subsystem with additional prolog teaching material

• Documentation on the Poplog Standard ML subsystem includes a file of introductory examples illustrating the language.

• 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)

• MAN Files, Startup Scripts and User Guide In the browsable directory http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup/ there are various documents, shell scripts, and poplog startup scripts (for pop-11 and Ved), which can be copied and installed on a system where Poplog is made available. These are included in the bham poplog packages. (Some of the scripts and documentation files in the distribution packages will be more up to date.)

  The Draft Abbreviated User Guide (in something like the format of a Unix/Linux "man file"), also included with the downloadable packages, 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 default linux Poplog installation script installs the corresponding man file in /usr/local/man/man1/poplog.1 with several names, so that it can be invoked by any of

      man poplog
      man pop11
      man pop_prolog
      man clisp (or man pop_lisp)
      man pml
      man ved
      man xved
  

  
  This may grow partly out of date.

  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

• Poplog documentation at the University of Reading
  Kindly made available by Anthony Worrall. His web site was created by converting all the documentation from an earlier version of poplog to html. Most of it will still be up to date, but many things have been updated on the Birmingham site in the last few years.

• Porting and rebuilding information
  
• For people interested in rebuilding Poplog after installing new source files, or porting to new platforms, the information in the sysdoc directory may be useful. In particular, there is a (draft) guide to rebuilding poplog in the sysdoc/rebuilding file.

  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)
  A browsable primer for Pop-11 is in primer
  This will generally be the most up to date version, from which other versions are derived.
  It can also be fetched as a gzipped tar file for local installation. pophtmlprimer.tar.gz

  Or a chm file for reading in a microsoft windows help browser, kindly converted by Michael Malien in June 2003 (since when there have been some changes to the html version).

  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 since version 15.53)
  • primer.pdf
    PDF version of Pop-11 primer (294 pages)
  • primer2.pdf
    PDF version of Pop-11 primer printing two pages per sheet (about 145 sheets)
  • primer.ps.gz
    Postscript version of Pop-11 primer.
  • primer2.ps.gz
    Postscript version of primer printing two pages per A4 sheet. (You may have to switch to 'seascape' mode to view this.)
  • primer2.pdf
    PDF version of primer printing two pages per A4 sheet.
  • primer.tex.gz (Out of date).
    Latex source of postscript version of primer, used to produce the postscript and pdf versions. The latex version also requires two graphical files for a diagram of the Poplog virtual machine, and a diagram showing how poplog fits into the operating system, available here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popmodel.eps
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/poplog.unix.medium.eps
    Here are GIF versions of those files:
    • The Pop11 virtual machine
    • How poplog fits into the operating system (simplified)
  • Robin Popplestone's 528 page book on Pop-11 (discussing many computational concepts in the light of Pop-11 and vice versa) going into far more detail about Pop-11 is also available here. (There is also a more elementary primer here, in various formats.)

JUMP TO CONTENTS LIST

LISP PACKAGES THAT WORK IN POPLOG

• Spartns (including Benchmark Results)
  Spartns is a SPARse TeNSor representation library, by Jeronimo Pellegrini
  (think of a tensor as a matrix with any number of dimensions).
  Spartns is distributed under the LLGPL license. Also available at the Spartns home: http://aleph0.info/spartns/

• SCREAMER
  Screamer is an extension of Common Lisp (by Jeffrey Siskind) that adds support for nondeterministic programming and provides a constraint programming language.

  Screamer downloads:
  

  • Screamer in 2001 gzipped tar file
  • CMU AI repository
  • Older version (1994) at Purdue Compressed Tar

  It is very likely that many more Lisp packages will work in Poplog Common Lisp.

• Programs for The Gazdar and Mellish Book on NLP are available in the Poplog 'contrib' directory

PACKAGES AND AI TEACHING MATERIALS

The RCLIB and RCMENU X-based user-extendable graphical interface tools.
NB: This is already included in the latest Poplog package for linux on PC.

RCLIB provides powerful object oriented tools for building graphical interfaces, including control panels with sliders, dials, scrolling text panels, etc. It supports interactive graphical interfaces to the Agent toolkit described below. Some examples can be viewed in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/figs/rclib

• 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.tar.gz

  RCLIB files can be browsed online: 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/

• The RCMENU (recursive hypermenu) package 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.

  Examples shown, including screenshot here.

  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.
  rcmenu.tar.gz

  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
NB: This is already included in the latest Poplog package for linux on PC.

The SimAgent is a very general and flexible toolkit for exploring agent architectures, with graphical display facilities based on RCLIB described above. The core of SimAgent is a powerful forward chaining production system interpreter, Poprulebase, described here, which supports integration of symbolic and subsymbolic mechanisms (e.g. neural nets). Multiple concurrent instantiations of Poprulebase define a processing architecture for an agent. The SimAgent toolkit supports development of systems in which multiple such agents can co-exist and interact. SimAgent was described in the March 1999 issue of Communications of the ACM.

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 standard Birmingham Linux Poplog packages, but 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
NB: This is already included in the latest Poplog package for linux on PC.

David Young at the University of Sussex has produced some excellent teaching materials and tools for image processing and AI vision, and has given permission for these to be distributed. A large collection of mathematical tools and array manipulation tools, including interfaces to the BLAS and LAPACK packages, has been added, constituting a matlab-like facility in Poplog, which is free and open source.

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 pop-11.

• 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

David Young's poplog web page at Sussex University includes some additional facilities that may be found useful, including

• 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

David Young at the University of Sussex previously produced some neural net facilities which were considerably extended by Julian Clinton. A slightly modified version of the resulting package is available here. The system can be browsed online in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/neural
(See especially the neural/help/* files -- though you may have slight problems with the "VED graphic" characters in a Web browser.)

The package is now automatically included with linux poplog (32 bit and 64 bit).
However, it can also be fetched from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/neural.tar.gz
It can be installed using the install_package script

The Simworld package

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/simworld.tar.gz
is a demonstration package by Matthias Scheutz showing how to use sim_agent to explore evolutionary processes in fairly simple agents. Requires the SimAgent toolkit (included in the latest linux poplog package).
Introductory documentation can be found in this directory.
The tar file can be installed (in unix or linux poplog) using the install_package script.

See also http://mypage.iu.edu/~mscheutz/

Contributions by Robin Popplestone

Robin was the designer of the language "COWSEL" which was redesigned and extended and first became widely known as POP-2, around 1971. Pop-11, the core language of Poplog, is a derivative of POP-2.

For many years he worked in the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, including making major contributions to the Edinburgh robot Freddy_II, the Alvey-funded Edinburgh DESIGNER system (which used Poplog), and other projects.

In 1985 he moved to The University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he continued doing research and teaching and making contributions at a distance to the development of Pop-11 and poplog.

He retired from UMASS around 2003(?) and moved back to Scotland, where he died in 2004.

There is a memorial web site for him at Umass

• http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/announce/robinpopplestone.html
  
• http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/announce/popplestone_endowment.html
  
• http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/announce/popplestonefellow2006.html
  
• older file .
• and another one in Edinburgh.

Book on Pop-11 and Programming

While at UMASS Robin Popplestone wrote a large draft book on Pop-11 Paradigms of Programming. Unfortunately he died before completing it. The latest version is available here, including a review by a reader, installed 11 Sep 2008.

The PopScheme System
(Scheme implemented in Pop-11)

This system, providing an incremental compiler for Scheme, was developed by Robin Popplestone at UMASS, and used there for teaching for several years. It became freely available online in October 1999. A copy is available which has been re-packaged to make it more portable (the original tar file had absolute path names, for instance). This has not been fully checked, though it does work with the examples.scm test file provided in the package.

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

Paradigms

Robin Popplestone's lecture notes on programming paradigms are available and browsable here, and downloadable here (gzipped tar file about 1MB),

Austin Tate's Nonlin planning system

The influential Nonlin hierarchical partial order planning system, developed by Austin Tate in the University of Edinburgh is available in a browsable and downloadable from here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin and also from the Edinburgh Nonlin Web site: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/

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.

It is also available from the Birmingham site.

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

An Online Eliza Chatbot in Pop-11 (Now with audio output.)

Eliza is a very famous very old AI program simulating a non-directive psychotherapist originally created as a demonstration of AI programming by Joseph Weizenbaum. (See this short Biography). A simplified version of Eliza, (a kind of Chatbot Eliza) implemented in Pop-11 is now online here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/eliza/
Between September 2002 and February 2005 this on-line Pop-11 Eliza had answered about 17,100 questions. It is just a toy, but is less repetitive than many of the online versions of Eliza (partly because of the variety of rules and partly because of the way rules are randomised on each cycle) and it has been of considerable educational value in introductory AI courses. A slightly simpler version of the code for the Pop-11 eliza is available for use with poplog.

A slightly revised version is used for the Poplog Eliza web site, available here: here).

NOTE: since the speak_espeak program was added to Pop-11, you can make Eliza speak as well as type responses to the user, provided you have the linux espeak package installed. Use google to find it for your system. On Fedora 10 it was installed simply by using the command:

    yum install espeak

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/doc/popteach/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

SOME ADDITIONAL BROWSABLE DIRECTORIES

The Pop-11 and AI teaching and documentation files previously included in the bhamteach tar package and now part of the standard Poplog distribution, 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.

• The http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/doc/ directory
  This contains copies of documentation directories in poplog, since version v15.63.
• 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)
NB: These are already included in the latest Poplog package for linux on PC.

Several additional "packages" are available, mostly developed in the University of Birmingham. All these are compressed tar files, or simply tar files. These should be unpacked in the $poplocal/local/ directory in order to be conveniently accessible. You can put them in a different place if you understand how to manipulate the search lists used by Ved and the Poplog compilers.

Do not install them if you have Poplog version 15.6, 15.62, or later, as they are already included.

• 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.
• Other superseded packages

THE POPEXTRAS PACKAGE (superseded)

GLOBAL OPEN SOURCE POPLOG LIBRARY (GOSPL) SITE (DEFUNCT?)
(The web site www.poplog.org is now defunct.)

Steve Leach and Graham Higgins once developed a Global Open Source Poplog Library (GOSPL) site, at http://www.poplog.org/gospl/ (currently not working - Aug 2009)

This contains some contributed programs not available elsewhere, provided by Steve Leach and Graham Higgins. However the 'gospl' code is available as a gzipped tar file here and as a browsable directory here.

THE CONTRIB DIRECTORY

The browsable contrib directory contains a number of packages and utilities made available to Poplog users.

The complete contents of the contrib directory are available in a gzipped tar file: contrib.tar.gz.

This includes source code from various books, including

• 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.

See also the materials developed at the University of Amherst by Robin Popplestone

RELATED POPLOG SITES