Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: My views on developing a PROLOG standard (long but fun!)
Message-ID: <795@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 88 01:09:49 GMT
References: <7847@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 43

In article <7847@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache) writes:
>           The matter of greatest concern for me is the question of whose
>      standard will be the standard?  The BSI group is a British standard;
>      Now I hear that the French are working on their own standard (the AFNOR
>      group).  All this is fine and good except that in all likelihood the
>      resulting standards will have about as much similarity with each other
>      as the French and English (natural) languages do (never mind the fact
>      that neither standard will have have much to do with existing practice)

Wrong.  Roger Scowen of NPL get the thing started; since the NPL is in
England he naturally got the thing started as a BSI project.  AFNOR are
not developing a rival standard;  they have been collaborating with the
BSI group for a long time now, and the Formal Specification is French work.
(While many people will find it the most confusING part of the BSI material,
it is arguably the least confusED.)  The whole thing has now become, I hear,
an ISO "work item", and the more recent BSI documents bear ISO reference
numbers.

>      That standard should be agreed upon not
>      just by the British and the French, but by ALL the major users of
>      PROLOG which includes (at the very least) most of Europe, Japan, and
>      the U.S.

Hear hear.  And don't forget the South Pacific (home of NU Prolog and CLP)
or Israel (home of Wisdom Prolog).

>      I took a
>      lot of heat for my imfamous PROLOG libraries, while the code quality
>      was perhaps inadequate, I believe that the concept was valuable.

Too right.

>           The last thing I would really like to see is some vast
>      improvement in the standard user interface tools.  Even if not all
>      hardware can support it, I would like to see some standard way to
>      access windows, i/o devices (i.e. mice), and or forth.

I understand that agreement on the Common Lisp binding for X is at least
a year away.  Plagiarism being the sincerest form of flattery, I suggest
that it might be an idea to wait for the Lisp people to do the work, and
then transliterate as much of it as possible.  Or would a 'curses'
binding be of more immediate use?  Either way, I don't see any need for
a standard way to access Forth; Postscript maybe, but not Forth (:-).