       Announcing a new release of the SLG System

The SLG system is a system for goal-oriented deductive query processing
and non-monotonic reasoning. It supports the following features:

  * goal-oriented query evaluation of normal logic programs under the
    well-founded semantics by Van Gelder, Ross and Schliph;

  * goal-oriented query evaluation of general logic programs under the
    alternating fixpoint logic by Van Gelder, with the restriction that
    the body of a clause has to be either an existential conjunction of 
    literals or a universal disjunction of literals.

  * goal-oriented query evaluation under the stable model semantics
    by Gelfond and Lifchitz.

  * integration with Prolog execution, and the use of Prolog syntax 
    for all programs.

The SLG system is freely available by anonymous ftp from Southern
Methodist University <seas.smu.edu> or SUNY at Stony Brook
<sbcs.sunysb.edu>. (See instructions at the end of this message.) The
implementation of the SLG system is supported in part by the National
Science Foundation under Grants No. IRI-9212074 and No. CCR-9102159.

The SLG system is an EXPERIMENTAL system, and carries significant
overhead as a meta interpreter on top of Prolog. You may take it and
use it at your own risk.

We appreciate any feedback concerning the system and its use, and try
to be responsive to any comments/requests/bugs/etc. If you want to be
on our mailing list for announcements of revisions and bug fixes for
the SLG system, please send an email message to one of the following
addresses:

   Weidong Chen
   Southern Methodist University
   <wchen@seas.smu.edu>

   David Scott Warren
   SUNY at Stony Brook
   <warren@cs.sunysb.edu>

HOW to ftp:

1) Issue ftp command to connect to SMU ftp server:

      ftp seas.smu.edu 

   or SUNY/SB ftp server:

      ftp sbcs.sunysb.edu

   When asked for name, respond with "anonymous";
   When asked for password, respond with "ident".

2) Change directory to where the SLG system is:

      cd pub
	(on cs.sunysb.edu, use cd pub/XSB)

3) Set transfer mode to binary:

      binary

4) Retrieve the SLG system:

      get slg.tar.gz
	(on cs.sunysb.edu, use get slg.tar.Z)

5) Exit the ftp program

      quit

6) Uncompress and untar the file:

      gzip -cd slg.tar.gz | tar xvf -
	(on cs.sunysb.edu, use uncompress -c slg.tar.Z | tar xvf - )

   This command creates a subdirectory slg in the current
   directory and uncompresses the files into that directory.
   There should be six files: README, slg_doc, slg.pl, and
   three example files, namely win.pl, expr.pl, loop.pl.

   (gzip binaries can be obtained from seas.smu.edu in
    /pub as well as from the official cite, namely prep.ai.mit.edu
    in /pub/gnu.)

7) (Optional) Remove the compressed SLG system

      rm slg.tar.gz
	(on cs.sunysb.edu, use rm slg.tar.Z)

8) Have fun with the SLG system ...

/* --------------------- End of README --------------------- */

