Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!apple!dan
From: dan@Apple.COM (Dan Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Help wanted on HyperCard and Expert Systems
Message-ID: <17871@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 27 Sep 88 23:17:27 GMT
References: <670002@otter.hple.hp.com>
Reply-To: dan@apple.com.UUCP (Dan Allen)
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 15

Yes, HyperCard COULD be a good front end for an expert system, although
I do not know of anyone doing this yet.  Yes, XCMDs can send messages to
HyperCard and writing a small Prolog compiler/interpreter as an XCMD is
feasible.  (The whole Pascal compiler portion of Turbo Pascal, for
example, is only 24K, but it was written in assembly, not C.)

The other option proposed would be to pass Prolog requests to an already
existing Prolog compiler running simultaneously under MultiFinder.  This
would probably require some sort of IPC which is not strictly supported
in the current versions of MultiFinder, although you could probably do
something by passing info back and forth through files written to the
disk, but that is kind of messy and slow.

Dan Allen
Apple Computer