/*******************NOTE****************************/ This text file contains the text elements of the file PMPRO.INF. The PMPRO.INF file can be viewed using the VIEW command of OS/2, or by double-clicking on its icon on your OS/2 system. It contains screen shots and other graphical elements to give you a better introduction to PMPro. /***************************************************/ We are pleased to announce the availability of the PMPro Prolog Interpreter (v 1.01 ) for OS/2. This new product provides the full power of the Prolog language at a very low cost. Its user interface is tightly integrated with the OS/2 workplace. It provides a powerful and user-friendly environment for learning Prolog, or developing professional calibre Prolog programs. The Prolog engine can be run separately from the user interface, and can be connected to your own OS/2 programs. See also: o Features. o Prolog's advantages o Version information o Future releases o Technical support o Price and ordering .************************************************** Features PMPro contains a Prolog language interpreter which has been embedded in custom products for several years. For the first time, this Prolog is available to OS/2 users and developers with a Presentation Manager user interface and an easily embeddable inference engine. Among its many features are: o A full suite of Prolog standard predicates. o Extensive context-sensitive help system. o Example programs you can run, trace and modify immediately. o OS/2 drag and drop integration for window colours and fonts. o OS/2 file drag and drop integration for Prolog database consultation. o Prolog Code file type template and associations. o A graphical user interface with response, trace, and debug windows, and a dialog window which saves all previous queries for fast re-submission. o Automatic inter-session memory of window options and placement. o Simple logging of interactive sessions (useful to certify testing of predicates under development). o Mathematical operators enhanced for vector operations. o Additional predicates for basic statistical operations. o Real-number math. o Fully 32-bit implementation. o Inference engine and response daemon communicate through named pipes which are easily specified as program parameters. OS/2 multitasking is thus exploited to provide responsive user interaction as well as simplicity and flexibility when embedding the engine. o User interface and engine can reside on separate machines in any network with OS/2 named pipe support. .*********************************** Prolog's advantages Prolog is a declarative language. By stating the facts and rules which relate objects in the problem domain to each other, you constuct your Prolog program. Its meaning is the set of logical consequences of these program statements, and this is computed by the inference engine at run-time. You do not have to be concerned with telling the machine how to solve the problem, nor where to put data in memory. This allows you to concentrate on the problem at hand rather than on software concerns. Scoping rules are simple and uniform in Prolog, and declaration of variable names is not required. This reduces code size and opportunities for error. Prolog programs tend to be from five to ten times smaller than the equivalent procedural programs. This reduces the opportunity for human error and reduces maintenance cost. Prolog is not specifically for Artificial Intelligence. It is a powerful general-purpose programming language with efficient implementations available on most computing platforms today. You can use PMPro to enter the world of Prolog programming at a low initial cost, or to mix Prolog subsystems into your own systems. You may find the Prolog approach so useful that you will want to move to a Prolog compiler for your next major system. Prolog has a history of use for linguistics research and natural language processing. While voice capture technology has solved the problem of translating sounds into phonemes and words, procedural languages (including object-oriented ones) have not provided a productive way of adding natural language "smarts" to your programs. This is one of Prolog's strengths, and is the reason we have chosen Mariah, a loquacious African Grey parrot, as our logo for PMPro. Mariah already has a great deal more language processing and context recognition power than your computer, but you can close the gap by using Prolog in your systems. Natural language interaction is the next great revolution in user interface design. The low-level problems have already been solved by speech recognition libraries like ICSS for OS/2. But using these libraries just to navigate menus is a waste. Give your programs the power to treat the word stream as language, by building PMPro into your systems! .*********************************** Version Information The inference engine used in PMPro has proved itself over several years of use and enhancement in custom embedded applications. These include knowledge-based simulation systems, multimedia presentation systems with embedded rule-based capability, natural language subsystems and expert systems. The current release has been enabled for OS/2 named pipes and provided with a new OS/2 PM Graphical User Interface. The components have all been re-designated starting from Version 1.0 despite the main engine's longer history. See Future releases for a discussion of the future directions of PMPro. .*********************************** Future releases Registered licence holders will receive service releases and upgrades free for a period of one year from the date of purchase. Because of the low price of PMPro, shipping on these free upgrades will be payable by the licence holder. Future releases will include some or all of the following features, though specific dates and packaging have not been announced. Your opinion on the scheduling of release of these features is welcomed: o DLL packaging of the embeddable feature. o SOM object packaging of the embeddable feature and the user interface components. o An open external DLL interface for accessing third-party DLLs from within Prolog code. o A suite of GUI system-supplied predicates. o Grammar rule handling by the system's parser (grammar rules are currently handled through the definite clause grammar translation example program which is provided). .*********************************** Technical support Technical support for PMPro is provided via CompuServe Information Service. Log on to CompuServe and type GO OS2AVEN at the prompt. Once in the OS2AVEN forum, select Other Vendors (section 1), and leave technical questions in a forum message. The messages are scanned daily and one-day (in some cases same-day) turnaround for replies can be expected. Those connected only to the Internet may place technical questions in a mail message to: 76159.1166@compuserve.com Those with no email connection may call 1-613-749-7984. .*********************************** Price and ordering PMPro is available at $50 US plus shipping charges ($5 US for first class mail and $10 US for UPS Courier) from the following source: Gregory Bourassa P.O. Box 27038, Gloucester, Ontario, Canada, K1J 9L9 Tel (613) 749-7984 Fax (613) 749-6619 email 76150.1166@compuserve.com Payment can be made by cheque or postal money order. Please provide your full shipping address with your order. Special prices are available for volume purchases. Re-distribution of the embeddable inference engine is royalty-free provided the product of which it forms a sub-system is not a direct competitor to PMPro's development environment. Please call for information. .***********************************