Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!aplcomm!uunet!mcsun!ukc!tcdcs!swift.cs.tcd.ie!brady From: brady@swift.cs.tcd.ie Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog Subject: Re: Poor state of Mac Prologs Message-ID: <1991Jun19.221421.7975@swift.cs.tcd.ie> Date: 19 Jun 91 22:14:21 GMT References: <421@daily-planet.concordia.ca> <6379@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Organization: Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin Lines: 39 > In general, I am very disappointed with the Prologs available for > the Mac. I have four or five Prologs for the Mac, and they are all > poor, in my mind. Doing a decent job on a Mac interface seems > to be beyond most Mac prolog implementors capabilities. I strongly Hmm, I've been developing an Edinburgh-like Prolog for the Mac for the last little while, and I'll admit that Mark has a point. For me, the main problem is the lack of a good interface _paradigm_. The style that I've seen that I'm most comfortable with is used in Apple's MPW, which (in my view) integrates mouses & windows etc. in a _programmer_ friendly way. It doesn;t handle graphics at all. Apart from MPW I haven't seen a professional programming environment that I'd leave home for. I really dislike a system with lots of bitty windows all over the place, & I've tried to avoid it. On a particular point, an 'external' (i.e. add-on) predicate in Open Prolog allows some graphics and supports cut-and-paste to other Mac applications. I'm still looking for a nicer debugging system than the standard 4-port one. Any civilised debugger should have access to the source code. Obviously, there are some problems with that in Prolog, but they aren't insurmountable, given a little time... One other important point for me is that I've been concentrating on things like garbage collection and indexing because I want to run long/big programs. A compiler that I run on it garbage collects 40 MB on a particular run. A simulated-annealing program can garbage collect many 10s of megabytes (even with clause indexing, etc. to reduce memory requirements). Another area is connecting up Prolog programs with other systems, like databases, sound systems, and so on. These are a little more important for me. BTW, it should be obvious that what drives me is interest, not profit. No doubt my system has bugs in it, but user feedback would improve matters there. So, for the moment, user interface development on Open Prolog will take a back seat.