Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!otter!sfk
From: sfk@otter.hple.hp.com (Stephen Knight)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Message-ID: <1350011@otter.hple.hp.com>
Date: 29 Jan 88 16:44:14 GMT
References: <5084@well.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories,Bristol,UK.
Lines: 39

We have been using the Poplog Common Lisp & Prolog systems for a couple of
years in HP Labs, Bristol.  The Common Lisp is of a high standard, a bit slow
in places, but very safe to use.  Prolog has speeded up a good deal since
Richard last used it [although I doubt it competes with Quintus
as a delivery environment.]  

I have spent a fair amount of time in interfacing systems written in C, Lisp,
Prolog, and Pop11 together in Poplog.  The ability to knit software written
in different languages together makes it a really neat system in practice.
Doing things like this is not always simple, but it is about as straightforward
as you could hope it to be when you have languages based on such widely
differing architectures.  

For functional programming people, there's now a Standard ML system available,
although the hooks to interface it to the other languages are still being
worked on.  I've used this a little and been quite intrigued by the 
good performance and implicit polymorphic typing.

Here are the US contact addresses for Poplog for anyone who is interested
in following it up.

It's Robin Popplestone who handles the distribution for academic users, who
can be contacted at

    Robin Popplestone
    Department of Computer and Information Science
    Lederle Graduate Reseach Center
    University of Massachusetts
    Amherst, MA 01003
    email: pop@edu.umass.cs

And for commercial users, it is

    Systems Designers International Inc
    Industrial Systems Division
    555, Read's Way
    New Castle, DE 19720
    USA
    tel: (302) 323-1900