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tannhaeuser08/10/20251 replyview on HN

Quantum Prolog is pure ISO and was the primary target for porting here. The idea is really just putting effort behind libs that can be shared by other non-legacy Prologs and thus get more people involved.


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YeGoblynQueenne08/10/2025

Look, I'll be blunt. If ISO is keeping you from running any ILP system newer than Aleph and you have a good reason to want to use an ILP system then you should reconsider the benefits of ISO. There's no ISO for LLMs for example, yet you'll have no trouble at all convincing people to get involved, there.

That said, I think Vanilla should be easy to ISO-fy. It's just a meta-interpreter really. It uses tabling and I'm guessing that's not ISO (it's more like the Wild West) but it is not indispensible.

https://github.com/stassa/vanilla/blob/master/src/vanilla.pl

I could have a look, but I have no idea what's in the ISO standard (and that's another bugbear- the ISO docs are not free. What?). I guess I could try to run it on your engine and see what the errors say though.

P.S. Re: "academic codes" I got documentation, logging, and custom errors and that's more than you can say for 100% of academic prototypes plus ~80% of industry software also. I do have unit tests, even, just not many.

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