Aquarius Prolog

A high performance open source Prolog development system that includes an interpreter and a compiler with global analysis but was a bit lacking in the debugging department. Originally built for speed and compatibility with Quintus Prolog, the system was developed by DEC in cooperation with a couple of Californian universities and therefore was initially shown on DEC Ultrix workstation but when finally released also had support for MIPS RISC/os, SunOS and HP-UX and was fairly easily portable to UNIX like systems that ran on 680x0, MIPS or SPARC processors.

Aquarius Prolog came in two distributions, Enduser and Full. The former had enough source code to allow you to compile and run it on one of the supported systems while the latter included full source code and implementation notes. Apparently the system would compile and run under OS/2 with the EMX project tools as an interpreter or cross-compiler, but there was never an 386 backend shipped so it had limited use as an OS/2 tool and was never distributed in that way. There was also a DOS executable floating around but apparently that was also done as a tool for students to test/do their homework on and was not usable as a DOS development system.

Development started in 1989 and source code releases were easily available from DEC and sundry distribution sites on the net. However when version 1 was finally released in 1993 the University of Southern California demanded that all source distributions be taken off the net and to fill out a form, agree to certain restrictions and pay a fee to get hold of the sources, which more or less killed any interest in the project.

Links

• Has an old documentation - However the source packages that were there have been removed.
• A Prolog benchmark suite for Aquarius
• Aquarius Prolog info page - Note the link to Peter Van Roy's Thesis on that page that has lots of interesting implementation related info.

Authors

• Aquarius Project at University of California/Berkeley
• Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory (ACAL) at the University of Southern California (USC)
• Digital Equipment Corporation's Paris Research Laboratory.
• Tom Getzinger
• Ralph Clarke Haygood
• Peter Van Roy