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From: karam@sce.carleton.ca (Gerald Karam)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: hierarchy among modules in prolog
Summary: MProlog has it, sort of.
Keywords: modules, hierarchy, Quintus prolog
Message-ID: <671@sce.carleton.ca>
Date: 8 Oct 89 15:40:44 GMT
References: <5641@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: karam@sce.UUCP (Gerald Karam)
Organization: Systems Eng., Carleton Univ., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 24

In article <5641@portia.Stanford.EDU> sreerang@Portia.Stanford.EDU (Sreeranga Rajan) writes:
>I would like to know if it is possible to make the visibility of
>assertions in modules hierarchical in prolog. The prolog I am using
>being Quintus prolog running on Sun-unix, seems to have a flat
>module system. Would there be any other prolog where its possible to
>have a hierachical module system? Any input on this is greatly
>appreciated.

Logiware International's MProlog allows modules to be constructed into a 
hierarchy using their consolidator (which is a module linker for 
applications).  It permits the user to construct a new interface (exports) 
and hide internal modules.

Their original system (v 1.5 circa 1984) had flat modules like every other 
Prolog I'd seen and I complained at the time that hierarchical modules had 
value.  They half heard me because the next major release (v2.1 i believe)
did support this concept, but not at the syntactic level --- which remained 
flat.  As a result, the hierarchical module feature was such a pain to use, 
I just ignored it.

gerald karam

karam@sce.carleton.ca
karam@sce.uucp