🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <831@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>
>
>B	2 Will the project depend upon research and development work now
>B	in train or yet to be started?  If yes, please give details.
>P	No.  The content of the standard will be based on Edinburgh Prolog
>P	as described in Programming in Prolog by W F Clocksin & C S Mellish
>P	Spring 1981.
>

I presumed that you meant something far more specific than that.
I doubt anyone could deny that our work is based on Edinburgh Prolog
as described in Clocksin & Mellish. But should it be limited
precisely to that?

Most of the discussions on this net are about details that C&M do NOT
cover--maybe that's part of the problem.

>%	Note that it says clearly:
>%	(a)  No research and development work either in progress or yet
>%	     to be started will be depended on.  At the time, I took this
>%	     to promise that they would be trying to standardise practice
>%	     as it stood in January 1985, not to invent a new language.
>%	(b)  The CONTENT of the standard is to be based on Edinburgh
>%	     Prolog, as described in Clocksin & Mellish.  At the time, I
>%	     was so naive that I took this to mean that the standard was
>%	     to be based on Edinburgh Prolog.

Do we not allow anything not stated in the C&M "de facto standard"?
There is all the difference in the world between basing something on
a proposal and adopting that proposal lock stock and barrel.
If it had been stated that it was based on MProlog or Marseille Prolog
or microProlog it would look an awful lot more different to what it 
looks like now.

Rereading
>%    At the time, I took this
>%	     to promise that they would be trying to standardise practice
>%	     as it stood in January 1985, not to invent a new language.

I realise that this is partially at least a retraction of what
Richard had said. The submission certainly did NOT say that it would
take no account of current research, or of the current state of the
art, nor that it would "standardise practice as it stood in January
1985" (whatever that means). These positions are scarcely compatible
anyway.

Chris Moss.