POPX@vax.oxford.ac.uk (Jocelyn Paine) (02/20/91)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Updates to Edinburgh Tools
Reply-To: popx@vax.ox.ac.uk (Jocelyn Paine)
Distribution: comp.lang.prolog
Organization: Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, UK.
Has anybody got improvements to the public domain Edinburgh Tools
library that they'd like to send me?
My immediate interest is in the GRAPHS and MAP modules. I received my
copy of the tools in mid-1989. My copy of GRAPHS lacks some comments;
for example, top_sort is present, but not commented, so I have to infer
its action from the code (and from Richard O'Keefe's book). I'd also
like to know whether anyone has built other general-purpose graph
routines on those in the original version of GRAPHS. Going to MAP, my
copy of MAP implements a map_value predicate that's O(N), but it's
commented saying that O(lg N) is possible using the trees implemented in
ASSOC, and that eventually ASSOC and MAP should be merged.
Perhaps someone has made the improvements suggested above. If so, I'd
like to have copies. But more generally, I'd like to add any
improvements to my library so that I can redistribute them. I'm too busy
with student projects right now to make a new version of the library (I
have some programs waiting to be put in), but I hope I can bring out a
new version in March.
How about it? I know the Quintus Prolog library is based on the
Edinburgh Tools, though much rewritten; perhaps (if anyone from Quintus
is listening), you'd be willing to cancel a debt to the public domain
by letting me redistribute some of your improvements?
Jocelyn PaineRay.Nickson@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Ray Nickson) (02/26/91)
In article <4819@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
Quintus has no debt to the public-domain library.
... and then explains that he and others now at Quintus wrote most of
it.
I do not believe there is any such thing as a debt (legal or moral) to
the public domain. By putting a work into the public domain the
author grants complete freedom to use it without any legal constraint,
and usually with few moral constraints.
If you (that's you generally, not Richard, I know his opinion!) want a
*free* Prolog library, then write or commission one, and use the
copyright law to make sure it remains free. You could even base it on
the DEC10 library souce (with appropriate credits, if _your_ morals
demand that).
I list below the library files that I have written to the Quintus
specification (without using the DEC10 library), and am working on
others in my spare time and as I need them. Of course, this approach
means you risk losing the correctness and efficiency that you pay for
with Quintus and that you probably get from the PD libraries through
long use.
In case you didn't guess by the rhetoric above, these all have a GNU
style copyright and license agreement (`copyleft') on them. If you
want them, I can email to you personally; unless there's an
overwhelming response (unlikely!), I'd prefer not to distribute
generally (yet).
(Some of these are not complete, and a few predate my decision to
follow the Quintus spec).
arg.pl
basics.pl
builtin.pl
change_arg.pl
curses.pl
freevars.pl
gensort.pl
listparts.pl
lists.pl
occurs.pl
ordsets.pl
same_functor.pl
sets.pl