🚀 go-pugleaf

> In general, I am very disappointed with the Prologs available for
> the Mac.  I have four or five Prologs for the Mac, and they are all
> poor, in my mind.  Doing a decent job on a Mac interface seems
> to be beyond most Mac prolog implementors capabilities.  I strongly


Hmm, I've been developing an Edinburgh-like Prolog for the Mac for the last
little while, and I'll admit that Mark has a point. For me, the main
problem is the lack of a good interface _paradigm_. The style that I've  seen
that I'm most comfortable with is used in Apple's MPW, which (in my view)
integrates mouses & windows etc. in a _programmer_ friendly way. It doesn;t
handle graphics at all. Apart from MPW I haven't seen a professional
programming environment that I'd leave home for.
I really dislike a system with lots of bitty windows all over the place, &
I've tried to avoid it.

On a particular point, an 'external' (i.e. add-on) predicate in Open Prolog
allows some graphics and supports cut-and-paste to other Mac applications.

I'm still looking for a nicer debugging system than
the standard 4-port one. Any civilised debugger should have access to the
source code. Obviously, there are some problems with that in Prolog, but they
aren't insurmountable, given a little time...

One other important point for me is that I've been concentrating on things
like garbage collection and indexing because I want to run long/big
programs. A compiler that I run on it garbage collects 40 MB on a
particular run. A simulated-annealing program can garbage collect many 10s
of megabytes (even with clause indexing, etc. to reduce memory requirements).

Another area is connecting up Prolog programs with other systems, like
databases, sound systems, and so on. These are a little more important for
me.

BTW, it should be obvious that what drives me is interest, not profit.

No doubt my system has bugs in it, but user feedback would improve matters
there. So, for the moment, user interface development on Open Prolog will
take a back seat.