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From: hawley@icot31.icot.or.jp (David John Hawley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Parlog references
Message-ID: <8966@icot32.icot.or.jp>
Date: 26 May 91 08:45:17 GMT
References: <1991May9.063445.9755@eng.umd.edu> <4672@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991May25.040834.9916@eng.umd.edu>
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Organization: Fifth Generation Computing Systems (ICOT), Tokyo, Japan
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In article <1991May25.040834.9916@eng.umd.edu> clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Chien-Hong Lin) writes:
>   Now for a question of my own.  What is the status of parallel
>Prolog (an implementation)?  Has any one come to be the standard
>(I doubt it, it seems still under development)?  Is it in any
>kind of wide use or is it still mainly used by the folks who
>developped?  How effectiveis the parallelism?  

There are several kinds of "parallel prolog", and lots of variations within
the same group.  The two main groups are

	1)  Parallel implementations that more-or-less preserve Prolog
	    semantics.

	    Aurora and Muse are two examples of OR-parallel systems.
	    I am not very aware of the status of systems that exploit both
	    AND and OR parallelism systems.

	2)  Concurrent logic languages - AND-parallel languages with
	    a commit operator (bidirectional cut) in every clause,
	    separating a number of builtin subgoals (the guard) from the
	    the rest of the clause's subgoals (the body).
	    
	    CP, Strand, and ICOT's KL1 are examples.

The list of systems I mentioned is by no means exhaustive.

The systems I quoted have parallel implementations.  Strand88 is being sold.
KL1 is being used, *apparently on a research basis*, by universities and other
research labs in Japan and elsewhere.  I don't know about the others.

-- 
Location: 4th-lab, ICOT, 1-4-28 Mita, Minato-ku Tokyo 108 JAPAN.
EMail: hawley@icot.or.jp, hawley@icot.jp@relay.cs.net,
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