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