Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!samsung!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Standard ---> IBM PROLOG translation
Keywords: translation
Message-ID: <3850@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 30 Sep 90 12:44:00 GMT
References: <2574@dsacg3.dsac.dla.mil>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 50

In article <2574@dsacg3.dsac.dla.mil>, ntm1169@dsacg3.dsac.dla.mil (Mott Given) writes:
>    This is a program that will translate Edinburgh style PROLOG syntax to
> that of IBM PROLOG, to reduce the number of changes you need to make manually.

May I respectfully suggest that a better way to translate from Prolog
to IBM PROLOG is to write a Prolog program?  What you want is something
that will read in Prolog code and write out IBM PROLOG code.  You will
of course want to be wary of "blind" replacement.  It would, for example,
be asking for trouble to replace 'close' by 'dcio'; consider
	estimated_distance_to_goal(State, close)	% not 'distant'
Better still, by using a Prolog program you can translate findall/3 to
compute/4 -- do others find it strange that "compute" and "computable
expressions" are unrelated? -- using a rule like

	prolog_to_PROLOG(findall(Template, Generator, List)
			,compute(list, Template, Generator1, List)
			) :-
		prolog_to_PROLOG(Generator, Generator1).

The thing that puzzles me most is that Chapter 13 of the IBM PROLOG
manual states clearly and explicitly in the very first paragraph that
	IBM PROLOG can process programs written with the Edinburgh
	syntax and using predicates that are normally part of an [sic]
	Prolog implementation for the Edinburgh syntax.
	You can switch freely between syntaxes in your program,
	and programs written in Edinburgh syntax can use all the
	built-in predicates and data types of IBM PROLOG.
IBM's "Edinburgh" syntax (called 'synt2') isn't _quite Edinburgh syntax,
but it's close enough for government work.

I note that
>                REPL=(1,0,C":-",C"<-"),                          
<- and :- are both accepted in *both* syntaxes, and that
IBM PROLOG supports abolish/2, assert/1, asserta/1, ...
>                REPL=(1,0,C"abolish",C"delax"),
>                REPL=(1,0,C"assert",C"addax"),                          
>                REPL=(1,0,C"asserta",C"addax"),
so that the most you should have to do to get at them in an IBM PROLOG
program is to stick 'built2:' in front of them.  The same applies to
pretty well all the other predicates listed in the message.  see/1 and
tell/1 are provided.  open/ and create/ aren't, but then there is no
(de facto or ISO) standard predicate called create/.

Admittedly, the manual I have is for Version 1 Release 1 on VM/SP,
but if IBM's MVS release of IBM PROLOG differs significantly from
IBM's VM/SP release, other Prolog vendors will have difficulty keeping
the smiles off their faces.

-- 
Fixed in the next release.