Department of Computer Science University of Maryland at College Park NONLIN COMMON LISP IMPLEMENTATION - General Notes (Version 1.2 - 2/5/92) This directory contains the source files for a CommonLisp implementation of the NONLIN planning system originally designed and implemented by Austin Tate. The implementation is relatively faithful to the methodology of the original NONLIN, although some name changes have been made within the operators to conform more closely to more recent usage in the planning community. The brief manual provided (see below) describes these differences and reports on how to load and run the program. We also provide some files with simple examples that are described in the document (useful for debugging and for learning to use the system). The system has been tested in several Commonlisp implementations, but of course we cannot guarantee that it will work in all implementations. Finally, we should note that an ability to make extensions to or to debug this code will require greater familiarity with NONLIN than is provided in the documentation provided. The original conference papers and technical reports on NONLIN (cited in the documentation) are required reading for anyone wishing to hack this code. -Subrata Ghosh, James Hendler, Subbarao Kambhampati, Brian Kettler ---------------------- INSTALLATION To obtain the necessary files: 1) anonymous ftp the necessary files: FTP to cs.umd.edu (128.8.128.8) login as anonymous cd /pub/nonlin binary get nonlin-files.tar.Z get nonlin.tex.Z (or nonlin.ps.Z) 2) Uncompress the files via "uncompress ". 3) The source code files should be extracted from the file "nonlin-files.tar" via "tar xvf nonlin-files.tar". This will install the files in a subdirectory named "Nonlin". The user manual describing the implementation and how to run NONLIN is contained in the files: nonlin.tex (latex version) nonlin.ps (PostScript version) (These document files should first be uncompressed as described above). ------------------------------ SUPPORT (such as it is) This project is being distributed free of charge with no implied warranty or support. To allow communication between users, we have set up some mailing lists which can be used for reporting bugs and getting reports of bug fixes. Announcements of patches and updates will be made via these mailing lists. We request that anyone ftp'ing this code send a message to "nonlin-users-request@cs.umd.edu" (US internet) letting us know you have a copy, and also letting us know if you wish to subscribe to the list "nonlin-users@cs.umd.edu". Information, new examples, etc. are expected to be shared via the nonlin-users mailing list, so we would recommend subscribing. Reports of bugs found in the implementation, and we are sure there are some, can be sent to "nonlin-bugs@cs.umd.edu" which will be read by the implementors and others who are familiar with the source code. If you wish to receive this mailing list, you may also send mail to "non-users-request@cs.umd.edu" although we ask that you be serious about participating. The nonlin-users list will be used to report bugs found via this mailing list as well as fixes to those bugs. The following mailing lists have been set up for this implementation of of NONLIN: nonlin-bugs@cs.umd.edu (to report bugs in the implementation) nonlin-users@cs.umd.edu (users of this implementation) nonlin-users-request@cs.umd.edu (for requests from users) ---------------------------------------------------------- correspondence can be addressed to Prof. James Hendler Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, Md. 20742 hendler@cs.umd.edu (US internet) or nonlin-users-request@cs.umd.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ON VERSION 1.2 (2/5/92): This latest release does not add much in terms of functionality to NONLIN. Rather, the main purpose of this release is to fix several bugs reported by alert users. An effort was made to fix as many of these as possible. As a result, almost all of the NONLIN files contain changes. These changes have been tested on our Macintosh Common Lisp implementation and should work on other Common Lisps. In addition, the PACKAGE statements have been removed from the source files as they have hindered the porting of the source code between different Lisps. NONLIN now writes various info to some global variables. This was done to facilite the use of NONLIN by other applications. These variables are described in the User Manual (Appendix F). Finally, additions have been made to the User Manual. A new section, "Tips for Working with Operator Schemas", has been added (new additions to this section are welcome from NONLIN users!!). The blocks world operator schema examples have been annotated in some detail. Other minor corrections have been made. Lastly, the notes on the (unsupported) DEVISER extensions, which were incorporated the previous (and this) release, have been added as an appendix. Please report any bugs found to nonlin-bugs@cs.umd.edu. Any comments or requests should be sent to nonlin-users-request@cs.umd.edu. Happy Planning!