[comp.lang.prolog] SICStus prolog vs. SBprolog?

kirkaas@ewa.cs.ucla.edu (paul kirkaas) (10/18/90)

I am interested if anyone has compared these two prologs; what are
their relative merits?

Paul

--
--
Paul Kirkaas
kirkaas@cs.ucla.edu

debray@cs.arizona.edu (Saumya K. Debray) (10/18/90)

> I am interested if anyone has compared these two prologs; what are
> their relative merits?

SICStus Prolog is in general much better than SB-Prolog: it's
faster, has a garbage collector and stack expander, and has
much better support.  It also supports primitives such as
freeze/1 that are unavailable in SB-prolog.  Also, I believe that
it's practically free for educational institutions.
-- 
Saumya Debray		CS Department, University of Arizona, Tucson

     internet:   debray@cs.arizona.edu
     uucp:       uunet!arizona!debray

ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) (10/18/90)

In article <40304@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, kirkaas@ewa.cs.ucla.edu (paul kirkaas) writes:
> I am interested if anyone has compared these two prologs; what are
> their relative merits?

SB Prolog: never mind the quality, feel the price!  (It's free.)
SICStus Prolog: it isn't free, but put it this way:  I can't think why
anyone who actually wants to use Prolog for serious work would prefer
SB Prolog to it.  It hews much closer to the `de facto' `Edinburgh'
standard than SB Prolog (Saumya Debray, on whom be blessing, wrote that
one of the privileges of an author of free programs is to indulge his
own taste).  Performance is much better.  As in really rather good (even
if you haven't got a 68020 and have to use C-interpreted code rather than
native code).  It doesn't fall over as often as SB Prolog.  It has a
rather crude form of coroutining (everything you need to build more
powerful schemes).

If you can't afford a commercial Prolog, SICStus Prolog is the best I
know of.
-- 
Fear most of all to be in error.	-- Kierkegaard, quoting Socrates.

micha@ecrc.de (Micha Meier) (10/21/90)

In article <4010@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>If you can't afford a commercial Prolog, SICStus Prolog is the best I
>know of.

Sepia is not yet well known, but it is an alternative that should be
also considered. It has all the features mentioned with SICStus,
plus some extras, e.g. the graphic interface for X and SunView,
synchronous and asynchronous event handling, constructive negation,
declarative corouting etc. I can give more details to everyone who
is interested. There is a nominal fee of ~ $200 for academic sites.

--Micha Meier
--
USA     micha%ecrc.de@pyramid.com	MAIL	Micha Meier
						ECRC, Arabellastr. 17
EUROPE  micha@ecrc.de				8000 Munich 81
						West Germany