BinProlog 2.20 is now available by ftp from

  clement.info.umoncton.ca  (139.103.16.2).

Apart from some (minor) bug fixes it is quite close to version 2.10.
The main reason of this release is the (new) ability to properly serve
other processes through a bidirectional pipe.

This is used for a Tcl/Tk interface finally giving state of the art
graphic and windowing capabilities to BinProlog.

(See the directory TCL of the distribution).

This distribution contains the Prolog source of the compiler and
executable emulators for:

  - Sparc - Solaris 2.x, SunOS 4.x; 
  - DEC Alpha - 64 bit version; 
  - MIPS - SGI, DEC; 
  - 68k - NeXT, SUN3;
  - R6000 - IBM;
  - 386-486 (MsDOS+Windows 3.1 - with DOS-extender go32 ver. 1.10 
    by D.J. Delorie).

The system has now floating point (double), mathematical functions, a
blackboard for permanent information and backtrackable global logical variables.

BinProlog 2.20 is probably the fastest freely available C-emulated
Prolog at this time (528 KLIPS on Sparcstation 10-40). This means 3-5
times faster than C-Prolog, 2-3 times faster than swi-prolog, 1.5-2
times faster than (X)SB-prolog and close to C-emulated sicstus 2.1.

BinProlog's engine is a specialization of the WAM to binary
logic programs that simplifies the implementation so much that
its Solaris executable is still only 49K (floats included!).

A new term compression technique (joint work with Ulrich Neumerkel)
reduces heap-consumption and adds some extra speed. Ulrich's iterative
copy_term/2 algorithm further accelerates BinProlog's `copy-once'
heap-based findall/3 and findall/4 so that findall-intensive programs
may run 2-3 times faster in BinProlog than in other (even native code)
implementations.

All data areas are now user configurable, and all except the heap are
garbage collected. A garbage collector for the heap will be released
soon.

Full sources of BinProlog's (very small) compiler and builtin libraries
are included in the distribution. BinProlog uses optimized versions of
D.H.D. Warren and R.A. O'Keefe's public domain read.pl, write.pl, DCGs
and a fast C-supported transformer to binary programs. It compiles
itself in about 10 seconds on a Sparcstation 10-40.

Multi-BinProlog 2.00 is a prototype Linda-style parallel extension to
BinProlog 1.71 developed by Koen De Bosschere and myself. This version
uses Koen's C-parser and C-writer which together speed-up IO
considerably. It works with shared-memory and remote procedure calls
and is also available from:

  clement.info.umoncton.ca

Some research papers explaining the implementations, example programs,
benchmarks and a User's Guide can be found at the same site.

BinProlog is free for reasearch and other non-profit purposes.  Use in
industrial applications, licensing of C-sources, porting to other
platforms, BinProlog related support and consulting are available but
need a separate agreement. BinProlog's very small code-size and high
performances make it suitable to be seemlessly integrated in industrial
C-applications that need the services of an embedded logic programming
engine.

             BinProlog 2.20 minimal configuration:

Uncompressed versions of BinProlog 2.20 are now also available on

  clement.info.umoncton.ca  (139.103.16.2).

in directory BinProlog/UNCOMPRESSED. If you do not want the full
distribution you can get only the binary for your particular
architecture/operating system from the directory:

  /BinProlog/UNCOMPRESSED/BinProlog.2.20/bin

i.e. one of the following:

386/               ru.alpha.dec*      ru.r6000.ibm*
ru.sparc.sunos*    ru.68k.sun3*       ru.sparc.solaris*
ru.mips.sgi*       ru.68k.next*       ru.mips.dec*

and the files

  /BinProlog/UNCOMPRESSED/BinProlog.2.20/wam.bp (precompiled top-level shell)

  /BinProlog/UNCOMPRESSED/BinProlog.2.20/doc/art.ps (UserGuide).

After getting the files, something like:

  ru.alpha.dec wam.bp

is all you need to run BinProlog 2.20 on a DEC-Alpha machine for example.

For DOS/Windows 3.1 machines you need wam.bp and the files in

   BinProlog/UNCOMPRESSED/BinProlog.2.20/bin/386

only.

Please send comments, bug reports and requests for industrial licensing
information to:

    binprolog@info.umoncton.ca.

The files
  /BinProlog/SOURCE.LICENSING and /BinProlog/BINARY.LICENSING provide
  information about various industrial licensing options.

Please send comments, bug reports and requests for industrial licensing
information to:

    binprolog@info.umoncton.ca.

Paul Tarau
Dept. of Computer Science  and  Logic Programming Group
Universite de Moncton           Simon Fraser University
Moncton N.B.                    Burnaby, B.C.
CANADA E1A-3E9                  CANADA V5A-1S6

E-MAIL: tarau@info.umoncton.ca  tarau@cs.sfu.ca