ALE 3.0 Beta

Gerald Penn (gpenn@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de)
Thu, 26 Mar 1998 15:24:45 +0100 (MET)

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Dear HPSGians,

  After nearly a year's delay, ALE 3.0 Beta is now ready.  Its new features are:

      - A semantic-head-driven generator, based on Gertjan van Noord's
        algorithm, as extended to the logic of typed feature structures by
        Octav Popescu,

      - A source-level debugger, with a graphical XEmacs interface, based on,
        and incorporating the SICStus source-level debugger, by Per Mildner,

      - Built-in extensional atoms (so that you don't have to declare them),

      - Functional descriptions, e.g., you can write (f:X,g:Y,h:append(X,Y)),
        rather than (f:X,g:Y,h:Z) with a relational attachment, append(X,Y,Z),

      - Optional edge subsumption checking,

      - Default specifications for types:  ALE assumes that types in the 
        signature not declared as subsuming another type are maximal, and that
        those not declared as being subsumed are subsumed by bot (with a 
        warning, of course),

      - More compile-time error and warning messages,

      - Several bug corrections,

      - An updated user's manual,

      - An SWI Prolog port.


OTHER NEWS


*ALE Homepage has moved*

ALE 3.0 is available from the ALE Homepage, which has moved to:

http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~gpenn/ale.html

The ALE mailing list address is still +dist+~gpenn/dl/The ALE mailing list address is still +dist+~gpenn/dl/ale.dl@andrew.cmu.edu.
Subscription requests should be sent to gpenn+@cmu.edu.


*System Requirements*

ALE 3.0 was developed with SICStus Prolog 3.0.  The SICStus version (ale.pl)
should run on some earlier versions as well.  There is also an SWI 2.9.7 port,
which is compatible back to at least version 2.7.14, and a Quintus port.  This
will be the last version for which we will provide a Quintus port (although
we will be happy to post ports that other people make).  We will now support
ALE for SICStus Prolog and SWI Prolog.

The ALE source-level debugger requires SICStus Prolog 3.0, patch level 6.  We
will make a debugger available for SWI Prolog users in a future release.
The graphical XEmacs interface requires XEmacs 19.15 or higher.  For best
results, it should also have been compiled with support for XPM.


*HDrug Graphical User Environment*

The HDrug-ALE interface is being ported to the new versions of both HDrug and 
ALE. It is available on the HDrug homepage:

   http://grid.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/hdrug

ALE 3.0 requires HDrug 3.9.99 or higher.


*Comments/Questions/Bug Reports*

These are always welcome, and more so now because this is a beta release.  You 
may post them to the list, or send them to us directly.  We are also very
interested to know what people are doing with ALE.  There is a space
on the ALE homepage where we post some of the reports of applications 
that we receive.


*Coming Soon* (and this time we mean it :-)

The next release or two of ALE will focus mainly on improving its performance - 
better and faster compilation, cleaning up the Prolog code, etc.



Enjoy,

Bob Carpenter and Gerald Penn

• Next message: Gang Liu: "Prolog and word formation"
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