Poplog
Encyclopedia
Poplog is a powerful multi-language
, multiparadigm
, reflective
, incrementally compiled
software development
environment, originally created in the UK
for teaching and research in Artificial Intelligence
at the University of Sussex
.
had been added to an implementation of POP-11
, the name Poplog was adopted, to reflect the fact that it supported programming in both languages. The name was retained, as a trade mark of the University of Sussex, when the system was later extended as incremental compilers were added for Common Lisp
and Standard ML
. At first the Poplog system ran only on a VAX
under the VMS
operating system
, but was later ported to a variety of Unix
systems, and later to Windows
then Linux
. A partial port to the Apple Mac running Mac OS X
on a PowerPC
was done in 2005.
For some time after 1983, Poplog was sold and supported internationally as a commercial product, by Systems Designers Ltd, whose name changed as ownership changed. (The company is now owned by EDS.) In 1989, it was called SD-Scicon. At that time a management buy-out produced a spin-off company Integral Solutions Ltd (ISL), to sell and support Poplog in collaboration with Sussex University, who retained the rights to the name 'Poplog' and were responsible for most of the software development while it was a commercial product.
ISL and its clients used Poplog for a number of development projects, especially their data-mining system Clementine, mostly implemented in POP-11, using powerful graphical tools implemented also in POP-11 running on the X Window System
. Clementine was so successful that in 1998 ISL was bought by SPSS Inc who had been selling the statistics and data-mining package SPSS
for which they needed a better graphical interface suited to expert and non-expert users. SPSS did not wish to sell and support Poplog as such, so Poplog then became available as a free open source system, hosted at the University of Birmingham
, which had also been involved in development after 1991.
. It is used to implement the other languages, all of them incrementally compiled
, with an integrated common editor. In the Linux/Unix versions, POP-11 provides support for 2-D graphics via X.
Poplog supports incrementally compiled versions of Common Lisp
(CL), POP-11, Prolog
, and Standard ML
. A separate package implemented by Robin Popplestone
supports a version of Scheme.
Poplog has been used both for academic research and teaching in Artificial Intelligence
and also to develop several commercial products, apart from Clementine. A UK government SMART award was given to ISL in recognition of Poplog exceeding sales of 5 million dollars.
PDP11 computer in 1976, and was ported to VAX/VMS in 1980. It became Poplog around 1982. Although the first commercial sales were for VAX/VMS, from the mid-1980s the main Poplog development work was done on Sun/SPARC
computers running Solaris
, although several different versions were sold, including versions for HPUX and a 64-bit version of Poplog for DEC Alpha running Digital Unix. After about 1999, when Poplog became available as free, open source, most development work was done on the Linux version, including porting to 64-bit Linux.
There is a version for Windows, originally developed to support Clementine, but the Unix/Linux graphical subsystem does not work on Windows Poplog. A possible workaround is to use the linux version of Poplog in virtual machine like VMware
on Windows. The Windows version of Clementine depended on a commercial package that supported X
functionality on Windows.
There is also a SourceForge
OpenPoplog
project which aims to produce a more platform neutral version of Poplog, including Windows. Latest development by this project includes a web server component for integrating into Poplog applications, and the OpenPoplog Widget Collection for supporting client user interfaces running in a web browser.
Additional information about the history and features of Poplog can be found in the entries for POP-2
and POP-11
. The chief architect of Poplog, responsible for many innovations related to making an incrementally compiled system portable, and providing support for a collection of very different languages was John Gibson, at Sussex University, though the earliest work was done by Steve Hardy. Chris Mellish helped with the initial Prolog implementation in POP-11. John Williams, working under supervision of Jonathan Cunningham implemented the Common Lisp subsystem. Robert Duncan and Simon Nichols added Standard ML. Between about 1980 and 1991 the project was managed by Aaron Sloman
, until he went to the University of Birmingham
, though he continued to collaborate with Sussex and ISL on Poplog development after that. Since 1999 he has been responsible for the main Poplog web site, as well as some of the extensions to be found there, listed under POP-11.
of POP-11
, the core language of Poplog, which is a general purpose Lisp-like language with a more conventional syntax. The implementation required the Poplog Virtual Machine to be extended to provide support for Prolog continuations, Prolog variables, the Prolog trail (recording undoable variable bindings), and Prolog terms.
The implementation was constrained by the need to allow data-structures to be shared with the other Poplog languages, especially POP-11
and Common Lisp
, thereby providing support for a mixture of programming styles.
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
, multiparadigm
Multi-paradigm programming language
Programming languages can be grouped by the number and types of paradigms supported.-Paradigm summaries:A concise reference for the programming paradigms listed in this article....
, reflective
Reflection (computer science)
In computer science, reflection is the process by which a computer program can observe and modify its own structure and behavior at runtime....
, incrementally compiled
Dynamic compilation
Dynamic compilation is a process used by some programming language implementations to gain performance during program execution. Although the technique originated in the Self programming language, the best-known language that uses this technique is Java...
software development
Computer programming
Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
environment, originally created in the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
for teaching and research in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
.
History
After an incremental compiler for PrologProlog
Prolog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...
had been added to an implementation of POP-11
POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
, the name Poplog was adopted, to reflect the fact that it supported programming in both languages. The name was retained, as a trade mark of the University of Sussex, when the system was later extended as incremental compilers were added for Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
and Standard ML
Standard ML
Standard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...
. At first the Poplog system ran only on a VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
under the VMS
VMS
- Communication and transportation :* Voice Mail System, automated telephone messaging* Video Messaging Service , video messaging for 3G handsets* VMS MobiFone, one of the largest mobile phone operators in Vietnam...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, but was later ported to a variety of Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
systems, and later to Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
then Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
. A partial port to the Apple Mac running Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
on a PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
was done in 2005.
For some time after 1983, Poplog was sold and supported internationally as a commercial product, by Systems Designers Ltd, whose name changed as ownership changed. (The company is now owned by EDS.) In 1989, it was called SD-Scicon. At that time a management buy-out produced a spin-off company Integral Solutions Ltd (ISL), to sell and support Poplog in collaboration with Sussex University, who retained the rights to the name 'Poplog' and were responsible for most of the software development while it was a commercial product.
ISL and its clients used Poplog for a number of development projects, especially their data-mining system Clementine, mostly implemented in POP-11, using powerful graphical tools implemented also in POP-11 running on the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
. Clementine was so successful that in 1998 ISL was bought by SPSS Inc who had been selling the statistics and data-mining package SPSS
SPSS
SPSS is a computer program used for survey authoring and deployment , data mining , text analytics, statistical analysis, and collaboration and deployment ....
for which they needed a better graphical interface suited to expert and non-expert users. SPSS did not wish to sell and support Poplog as such, so Poplog then became available as a free open source system, hosted at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, which had also been involved in development after 1991.
Supported languages
Poplog's core language is POP-11POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
. It is used to implement the other languages, all of them incrementally compiled
Dynamic compilation
Dynamic compilation is a process used by some programming language implementations to gain performance during program execution. Although the technique originated in the Self programming language, the best-known language that uses this technique is Java...
, with an integrated common editor. In the Linux/Unix versions, POP-11 provides support for 2-D graphics via X.
Poplog supports incrementally compiled versions of Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
(CL), POP-11, Prolog
Prolog
Prolog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...
, and Standard ML
Standard ML
Standard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...
. A separate package implemented by Robin Popplestone
Robin Popplestone
Robin John Popplestone was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He developed the POP programming languages....
supports a version of Scheme.
Poplog has been used both for academic research and teaching in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and also to develop several commercial products, apart from Clementine. A UK government SMART award was given to ISL in recognition of Poplog exceeding sales of 5 million dollars.
Platforms
POP-11 was at first implemented on a DECDigital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
PDP11 computer in 1976, and was ported to VAX/VMS in 1980. It became Poplog around 1982. Although the first commercial sales were for VAX/VMS, from the mid-1980s the main Poplog development work was done on Sun/SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
computers running Solaris
Solaris Operating System
Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010....
, although several different versions were sold, including versions for HPUX and a 64-bit version of Poplog for DEC Alpha running Digital Unix. After about 1999, when Poplog became available as free, open source, most development work was done on the Linux version, including porting to 64-bit Linux.
There is a version for Windows, originally developed to support Clementine, but the Unix/Linux graphical subsystem does not work on Windows Poplog. A possible workaround is to use the linux version of Poplog in virtual machine like VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
on Windows. The Windows version of Clementine depended on a commercial package that supported X
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
functionality on Windows.
There is also a SourceForge
SourceForge.net
SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available...
OpenPoplog
project which aims to produce a more platform neutral version of Poplog, including Windows. Latest development by this project includes a web server component for integrating into Poplog applications, and the OpenPoplog Widget Collection for supporting client user interfaces running in a web browser.
Additional information about the history and features of Poplog can be found in the entries for POP-2
POP-2
POP-2, often referred to as POP2 was a programming language developed around 1970 from the earlier language POP-1 by Robin Popplestone and Rod Burstall at the University of Edinburgh. It drew roots from many sources: the languages LISP and ALGOL 60, and theoretical ideas from Landin...
and POP-11
POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
. The chief architect of Poplog, responsible for many innovations related to making an incrementally compiled system portable, and providing support for a collection of very different languages was John Gibson, at Sussex University, though the earliest work was done by Steve Hardy. Chris Mellish helped with the initial Prolog implementation in POP-11. John Williams, working under supervision of Jonathan Cunningham implemented the Common Lisp subsystem. Robert Duncan and Simon Nichols added Standard ML. Between about 1980 and 1991 the project was managed by Aaron Sloman
Aaron Sloman
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He is the author of several papers on philosophy, epistemology and artificial intelligence...
, until he went to the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, though he continued to collaborate with Sussex and ISL on Poplog development after that. Since 1999 he has been responsible for the main Poplog web site, as well as some of the extensions to be found there, listed under POP-11.
Implementation
The Prolog subset of Poplog is implemented using the extendable incremental compilerIncremental compiler
The term incremental compiler may refer to two different types of compiler.-Imperative programming:In imperative programming and software development, an incremental compiler is one that when invoked, takes only the changes of a known set of source files and updates any corresponding output files ...
of POP-11
POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
, the core language of Poplog, which is a general purpose Lisp-like language with a more conventional syntax. The implementation required the Poplog Virtual Machine to be extended to provide support for Prolog continuations, Prolog variables, the Prolog trail (recording undoable variable bindings), and Prolog terms.
The implementation was constrained by the need to allow data-structures to be shared with the other Poplog languages, especially POP-11
POP-11
POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
and Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
, thereby providing support for a mixture of programming styles.
See also
- POP-11POP-11POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the at the...
- PrologPrologProlog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...
- Common LispCommon LispCommon Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
- Standard MLStandard MLStandard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...
- Programming languageProgramming languageA programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
- Software development environment