ok@goanna.oz.au (Richard O'keefe) (04/10/90)
In article <2831@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>, piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum) writes: > Question: has anybody compared the relative merits of Edinburgh C-Prolog > vs. SBprolog? C Prolog is a structure-sharing interpreter. SB Prolog is a WAM-based compiler. As such programs run faster and take less memory in SB Prolog. In terms of syntax the two are pretty close; SB Prolog has taken a mistake which was present in some early versions of C Prolog (that "$" was not reset to the same character class as "+" after booting, but was left in the same class as "a", which was intended only for the booting phase) and made it a feature. SB Prolog has quite a few extra predicates, in particular it supports "extension tables" (Dietrich). C Prolog is not public domain and never has been, and so is not available for FTP. It is cheap to research sites, not cheap to commercial sites. SB Prolog is not public domain either, but is covered by a GNU-style copyleft. It is available for FTP (from cs.arizona.edu). You shouldn't use either SB Prolog or C Prolog for anything other than private research, C Prolog being rather slow and SB Prolog not being noted for robustness.