dave@quintus.com (David Bowen) (08/27/90)
Quintus Announces Industry's First
Fully Embeddable Prolog Development Tool
For Commercial C Programmers
-- Prolog 3.0 Offers Enhanced Ease-of-Use
With X Windows-based Quintus User Interface --
Mountain View, California, July 16, 1990 -- Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.,
of Mountain View, Calif., an Intergraph company, today announced the avail-
ability of the industry's first Prolog development system that is fully
embeddable in C applications. Quintus Prolog 3.0 enables commercial software
developers to write the high level, inference-based portions of an applica-
tion rapidly and then easily embed them in C code.
Quintus Prolog 3.0 also offers a new Quintus User Interface (QUI), based on
the widely available X Window standard developed by MIT and supporting
companies. QUI supports the OSF/Motif look-and-feel across all 3.0-supported
platforms. It allows Prolog programs to be run, edited and debugged while
being viewed from a set of appropriate windows, with each window providing
menus of additional operations possible. QUI includes a window-based Prolog
source-level debugger, which allows full debugging of compiled code. It
also makes use of the X resource manager to permit users to customize their
QUI windows.
Quintus is targeting Quintus Prolog 3.0 for commercial software development
environments, to support meeting the increasing backlog of complex computing
needs of the 1990's.
"Quintus Prolog has established itself as the de facto industry standard
Prolog compiler in artificial intelligence applications," said Quintus
president Walter Samuelson. "Our newest release transitions Prolog from an
AI niche product, to a broadly usable tool that expedites the development of
commercial application components."
Pricing and Availability
Quintus Prolog 3.0 is immediately available for Sun 3 and 4 workstations at
a quantity one price of $10,000. Quintus will port the product to additional
platforms, such as the DECstation family, IBM RISC System/6000 and Intergraph
6000 Series, by the end of 1990.
Multi-Lingual Approach to Software Engineering
With this newest software release, Quintus is addressing the growing trend
toward a multi-lingual approach to program development. As programmers
grapple with ever-increasing application backlogs, they are reaching for
specialized tools -- ones that are interoperable with other languages and
programming tools -- to help them create programs more efficiently.
Application development is being optimized by using the right tool for the
right function.
Quintus Prolog's ability to be embedded in C programs allows it to "peacefully
coexist" with traditional languages, while enabling programmers to tap into
its inherent strengths. Prolog's key strengths are in the areas of:
Reasoning
=========
Prolog's efficient backward-chaining inference engine can be used directly as
an expert system tool and as an implementation tool for developing
alternative special-purpose expert system shells. This flexibility is
important for developers wishing to incorporate selected knowledge repre-
sentation and inference techniques that are most appropriate for their
applications.
Data Manipulation
=================
Prolog provides an efficient virtual-memory database for both facts and rules
and has dynamic data structures that are constructed and accessed through
pattern matching. Memory management is completely automatic and the
declarative semantics of Prolog means that all data operations are safe; there
can be no back pointers or memory faults. These high-level constructs
simplify the development of sophisticated algorithms that manipulate complex
dynamic data structures.
Meta-Programming
================
Prolog's formal roots in predicate logic make it especially suitable for
"meta" programming, where programs manipulate other programs and data
represents information about other data. Applications that benefit from this
strength range from expert system validation tools, through CAD hardware
description language translators, to front-ends to databases that automate
the generation of complex queries given the data definitions and other
meta-data.
Databases
=========
Prolog is a relational language which allows developers not only to store
facts, but also to use rules to program in a database style. Because
Prolog is relational, interfaces to external relational databases are seen
by the developer as a natural extension to the internal Prolog database.
Prolog can be used as a complete virtual-memory database; it can be
interfaced to external databases to apply high-level Prolog rules to
extracted data; or, it can be used to develop front-ends that generate SQL,
4GL, or even natural language code from high-level specifications.
Quintus Prolog Applications
Quintus Prolog is an appropriate tool for applications that require these
capabilities and combinations of them. For general applications, this
includes database applications, computer-aided tools (CAD/DAM/CAE), non-
numeric simulations, and intelligent user interfaces. For knowledge-based
applications, this includes expert system development, expert system
support tools and natural language interfaces.
For these and other application areas, Prolog is an important productivity
tool. Prolog programs are concise - it takes significantly less code to
implement appropriate high-level programs im Prolog than in languages like
C and Pascal. In addition, Prolog programs are modular and readable,
which makes them easier to understand and modify. Because of this, Prolog
greatly assists rapid application development in the face of changing
requirements and specifications.
The Quintus Prolog development, deployment, graphics, database and
communications products further support the productivity of application
developers. The Quintus Prolog 3.0 embeddability capabilities now allow
developers to harness the power of Prolog and apply it where it is needed,
in conjunction with other languages and tools.
About Quintus
Quintus Computer Systems, Inc., is the world's premier supplier of Prolog-
based software development tools. In October 1989, the company became a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Intergraph Corporation (NASDAQ Symbol: INGR), a
world leader in interactive graphics workstations, systems and servers.
Quintus is located at 1310 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041.
Phone: 1-800-542-1283, 415-965-7700, FAX: 415-965-0551.
For further information, send email to sales%quintus.com@sun.com or contact
Annette Adler, Director of Marketing, tel. 415-965-7700, or email to
adler%quintus.com@sun.com