OpenPoplog is an initiative to encourage the uptake of Poplog and attract programmers to develop the system further.
Poplog is a sophisticated, incrementaly-compiled, multi-language, virtual machine based programming system. The core language, Pop-11, can trace its antecedents back to an early version of Pop-1, running at Edinburgh in 1966.
Much of Poplog was developed over many years at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at Sussex University. In that time, a large library of teaching materials was developed and integrated into the system.
For much of the 1990s, academic licenses for Poplog were available from Sussex University, while commercial development and support was provided by Integral Solutions Limited (ISL), now part of SPSS. ISL successfuly used Poplog in their Clementine data mining product. At the turn of the century, Aaron Sloman, one of the major champions of Poplog, moved to the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University, where he secured the agreement of ISL and Sussex University to release a v15.53 of Poplog under a MIT/X-Windows-style, open-source license. Together with the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University, Aaron maintains the Birmingham FreePoplog web site. Various versions of Poplog for several different platforms can be obtained from here. Further information is available at the Poplog Forum site, www.poplog.org.
A wiki has been set up, (using SourceForge's Wiki system), to collect information about the software, the project(s), and the organisation.
A draft OpenPoplog RoadMap [mind map] [xml file] is being used to capture the ideas emerging from current discussions about the plans for the OpenPoplog organisation and the OpenPoplog software. You will need to have a recent version of Java installed and enabled in order for the FreeMind applet, that displays the browseable mind map, to work.
Some of the extensive Poplog documentation is now available on this site. A majority of the Poplog DOC and REF files have now been posted. These contain many links to documents (particularly HELP and TEACH files) that have not yet been posted, so the links will fail. Many of the files that have been posted are out of date and provide poor (or no) coverage of the Windows version of Poplog.
An alternative source for the complete set of files is available on Anthony Worrall's site at Reading University.
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