%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Wild_LIFE is here at last! The Wild_LIFE interpreter is the first implementation of the LIFE language available to the general public. It is a product of the Paradise project at the DEC Paris Research Laboratory. LIFE (Logic, Inheritance, Functions, and Equations) is an experimental programming language with a powerful facility for structured type inheritance. It reconciles styles from functional programming, logic programming, and object-oriented programming. It subsumes, and fully contains the functionality of, the precursor languages LOGIN and Le_Fun. The syntax of Wild_LIFE has been kept as close as possible to that of the Edinburgh family of Prolog so that Prolog compatibility is easy to achieve. From a theoretical point of view, LIFE implements a constraint logic programming language with equality (unification) and entailment (matching) constraints over order-sorted feature terms. The interplay of unification and matching provides an implicit coroutining facility thanks to an automatic suspension mechanism. This allows interleaving interpretation of relational and functional expressions which specify structural dependencies on objects. The Wild_LIFE interpreter is a fully functional implementation of the LIFE language. It has been extensively tested on DECstations running Ultrix, and it has been ported to other Unix workstations (including SPARCstations). It should not be hard to port to workstations running BSD-lookalikes. It has a comfortable user interface with incremental query extension ability. It contains an extensive set of built-in operations as well as an X Windows interface. This release contains the following: 1. The C and LIFE source code of Wild_LIFE. 2. A set of non-trivial example programs including an incremental Gaussian equation solver, a PERT scheduler, a full LIFE parser, a flower-drawing program that handles X events, uses an X toolkit and a 3D turtlegraphics package written in LIFE and compiles rewrite rules into LIFE. 3. A draft user manual. 4. An extensive test suite to verify the correct working of the interpreter. The system is available by anonymous ftp from gatekeeper.dec.com. After logging in, enter the command "cd pub/plan" to go to the right directory, and then "bin" to go to binary transfer mode. Then enter the command "get Life0.91.tar.Z" to get the system. Uncompress and untar this file to obtain the Life/ directory. Read Life/README for further instructions. The Paradise project has written many articles and research reports on various aspects of LIFE. Read Life/README for instructions on how to get copies. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Relevant electronic mail addresses: Here are email addresses that are relevant to LIFE and Paradise: life-users@prl.dec.com This is a mailing list of people using LIFE or interested in specific aspects of LIFE, whether theory, implementation, or applications. It is meant as a public forum to answer FAQ's and share programs and ideas. It is not meant to report bugs, although it may be used to ask public opinions about surprising behavior of Wild_LIFE that may turn out to be a bug and to warn others against confirmed bugs. life-request@prl.dec.com This address is to be used to request to be be put on, or removed from, the life-users mailing list. life-bugs@prl.dec.com When you strongly suspect a bug (i.e., after reading the manual, the life-users' FAQ's, and polling life-users's opinion about the symptoms), try to find the *smallest* program that illustrates the bug and mail it to this address together with a script that shows the bug. paradise@prl.dec.com This is PRL's local LIFE community. That is, all the PRL people involved in some activity in the Paradise project at PRL. Use this for general communication of matters of interest to this group alone. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ---------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Van Roy Digital Equipment Corporation Net: vanroy@prl.dec.com Paris Research Laboratory Tel: (33) (1) 47 14 28 65 85, avenue Victor Hugo Fax: (33) (1) 47 14 28 99 92500 Rueil-Malmaison Cedex Home: (33) (1) 30 61 41 29 France ----------------------------------------------------------------