http://poems.aule-browser.com/fr/cime_marin_001.htm

Some of the Aule buttons are to such topics as Prolog embedded in Smalltalk and constraint resolution implemented in Smalltalk.

And there is a link to the XSB OpenShore project. Several links relate to DataLog and minimalist rule engines.

If you have fallen out of touch with Prolog, now might be the time to visit Logtalk or BinNet, both on the top toolbar of this Aule Browser as defaults.

As advanced features appear in the wikipedia browser and migrate into common Curl packages, those features will automatically become part of your Prolog Aule when you next visit the site.

More information on installing this and other Aule Browsers on your Windows desktop will follow in the days to come.

One of the most interesting is Yield Prolog

The C# language feature which appeared in version 2.0 and which brings C# up to the ranks of Smalltalk and Ruby is yield. It means that a block of code can be treated like an object.

What this means for a Prolog implementation is that it is possible to mix declarative predicates with more imperative or functional code. While there is usually a means to accomplish this, the price paid is usually performance. In the case of the multi-paradigm Oz language, the Horn-clause approach of Prolog was abandoned. In other cases there is a foreign language interface to C or java, but with a performance price whenever calling out to Prolog.


For years there had been two Prolog variants which offered good performance: both commercial PDC Prolog and academic Mercury were typed prolog variants. Now Prolog comes to a typed-environment ( for SmalltalkProlog see our portal at www.aboutus.org )

And now that there is a project underway to bring Mercury to .NET it is very interesting to see what can be done within C# itself.

Yield Prolog adds very little baggage: the price you pay is abandoning some familiar Prolog syntax in exchange for prolog-like behavior.

But this user is different: unlike most of Steve Ballmer’s customers, this user is a developer – and in the two languages of which Gates was ignorant in the 80’s: Smalltalk and Prolog.

So what can a user do after OneNote 2007 trashes OneNote 2003?

Build a better mousetrap. And market it.

Applications such as OneNote have a future in collaborative computing. But OneNote is not there yet. Not by a long shot. And Leo will not make it as a collaborative outliner without such a major re-write as to be a non-starter from the get-go. TreePad has had its shot.

OneNote is for GTD: Getting Things Done.

So evolve: use OneNote 2007 extensively while building its competitor. a product not married to MS Office and IE7+.

We might call it, I don’t know, EclecticPens

Many of us lamented the loss of the 99$ word processor in the MsWord-WordImperfect-AmiAmateur wars. But in the days of WordStar there were such products. I owned one which was excellent but was only bundled on Zenith computers. Remember Zenith PC’s? Bundle or die. And ignore antitrust – the DoJ didn’t even have PC’s.

Today there is TextPad and the free Crimson Editor. But I am betting they will not become web-collaborative any more than emacs or vim.

EclecticPens

So having praised OneNote 2007 I decided to upgrade my OneNote 2003. The upgrade path was not obvious so I decided to be cautious. First I would remove the trial version. As it was running a doubt crossed my mind, and I quickly copied ./My Notebook from My Documents to a backup drive. Nothing seemed amiss after the removal of OneNote 2007 Trial. Add or Remove Programs still had a Microsoft OneNote 2003 and my Startup menu still had my OneNote 2003 icon. So I clicked that icon. Now Big Bill tells me that he is re-installing OneNote 2003. Then he tells me that the SKU1A1.CAB cannot be found. The maroon.

Quote. YOur Microsoft OneNote 2003 installation source has been corrupted or removed.

I hate, loathe and detest Microsoft. Not that info tech did not have arrogant companies before IBM wanted a DOS for the PC. But this one is special. IBM had customers. This one has users.

Oh I understand … that install/uninstall was only tested on VISTA … with 64-bit dual cores. Have I no shame, a 32-bit XP too timorous to be a pirate?

Piracy was what he feared. Not users, not Ricoh, not IBM, not USDJ. What, after all, can a user do?

Then I went to check for an upgrade to my one worthwhile Microscoff application, the incomparable Office OneNote. Ka-boom! OneNote opens a page in Firefox and before I can even click the check for updates

Caveat emptor. But I refuse to diss the upgrade to OneNote 2007. If you love OneNote 2007 as I do, then pay the devil his due. But flip your default browser to IE7 while you do it …

For tools only, the simplest way to go is just to create a \bin and \usr\local\bin and all the rest on your C drive. Selectively add them to your path with BAT or CMD or WSF files or leave them tagged on the end of your ‘user’ PATH environment variable. You might want to grab a zsh and a bash and a grep for starters. But you will be missing the little-known gem of unix, which is screen.

The next step up is to get the minimal GNU Mingw Msys installed. This may mean occasionally setting your ‘CC’ env var to being just empty with

set CC=

but that should be the worst pain you encounter until you need a make.exe which is not Mingw and not nmake.exe That is why I am working on tools for my web site at make-config.net.

But I cannot get GNU screen to run under mingw Msys; please POST if you know how …

Then there is what so many loathe: installing Cygwin. This means running cygwin’s current setup.exe from the Cygwin homepage, selecting a source repository, a local repository and just getting things right enough after the install that you can start building everything that is wrong, missing, out-dated or broken. It’s just the reality.

It could be worse. You could opt for UWIN from AT&T research. At one time I had some dealing with the 3B2 boxes for AT&T unix, so I could be biased. And I refuse to provide a link to their web site for UWIN.

Some think that ‘research’ languages are those which either don’t behave or don’t compile or don’t link or weren’t intended to do one or more of the above. But what about Windows tools for Unix-functionality from a one-time major player?

Imagine that the webmaster at sourceforge develops a READ-THIS-LICENSE monomania and forces you to register with a login name that MUST START with I-READ-THE-LICENSE_.

We might live with it if sourceforge were otherwise unaffected. But suppose that it also meant that first you couldn’t find any download links and then those you found were broken and Oh why did I not embrace Ruby the night we first met !?!

There are issues elsewhere (not at rubyforge, in my experience) such as my recent failure at Cincom’s public repository to get a working BottomFeeder to install. Or when I make the mistake of using an MSI for a Windows install from ActiveState. But UWIN.

They give the notion that ‘having a plan B is a good idea’ something of a bad name.

If you ever are able to layout 7 simple steps to download a UWIN package, please POST to somewhere public IFF said packages, in fact, run on, say, XP SP2. I fear you will end up with 12 steps. Not to bash ash and ksh. Not at all. UWIN. I leave.