The Franz Tech Corner, July 19, 2004
A New Prolog implementation within Allegro CL

The new Prolog implementation in Allegro CL, called Allegro Prolog, is
based on the implementation developed by Peter Norvig in Paradigms of
Artificial Intelligence Programming (June, 1991). All rules for a
given functor/arity pair are automatically compiled into a single,
highly-optimized Lisp function. Execution speed in excess of 1 Mlips
can be attained on current hardware, and the Prolog engine has been
optimized to run essentially cons free. Special treatment is given for
facts, ie, rules with no variables in the head and no clauses in
the body. The Lisp function automatically captures these as data
instead of code, allowing reasonably large collections of data to be
specified as regular Prolog rules. Larger, highly-scalable data sets
can be implemented by extensions in Lisp. For more information:

http://franz.com/support/tech_corner/#prolog-071504

Other bits:

1. Oracle Users. We have a pre-release version of Allegro Oracle
Direct Connect, a flexible and high-performance Oracle interface,
available for interested parties to preview before its official
release later this year. Allegro Oracle Direct Connect allows you
to have many connections to the same or different databases. Oracle
Direct runs both in blocking and non-blocking mode. In blocking mode
Lisp will wait for the return of your sql command and if you have
many short transactions or requests, this is usually the most
efficient mode. If you mix both long transactions and short
transactions, non-blocking mode is usually better. Please send email
to sales@franz.com if would like to try it out.

2. Lisp in the Press. Electronic Design Online published an
interesting article titled "Embedding With A Lisp" by Bill Wong
http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/ArticleID/8420/8420.html

3. Success Story. Read about an exciting application from PEPITe
S.A. and learn how their unique decision-making application for large
databases, called PEPITO, is making competitors take notice.
http://franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/pepite.lhtml

4. Upcoming Trade Shows

- AAAI Conference - Join us July 27-28 at the 2004 American
Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference to be held
in San Jose, California. http://www.aaai.org/

- Linux World Conference and Expo - Stop by our booth # 1667 at Linux
World August 3-5 in San Francisco and register for a chance to win an
Allegro CL license. http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/

- Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence -
Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu, VP-Corporate Development, Franz Inc., will be
presenting "Lisp and Web Services for Information Sharing and
Knowledge Building" as a key note speaker at PRICAI 2004 to be held in
Auckland, New Zealand, August 9-13. http://www.pricai04.info/

5. Services

- Web Services Seminar - ***FULL*** The July 21 seminar on Lisp based
Web Services is now completely booked. Send me an email message
to receive notification of the next session.
http://franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/power_programming.lhtml

- Allegro CL Certification Program - Basic and Intermediate courses
available. Next 3-day session: 7/21, 7/28, and 8/4,
http://franz.com/services/classes/

- Make the most of your Allegro CL application by utilizing our
consulting services, http://franz.com/services/consulting/

For more information about other Franz products and services, please
contact your product application manager or email sales@franz.com.