Visual Prolog version 5 was delivered in January 1998 and bought with it harmonisation of all the separate VPI 16 and 32 bit versions into one cross platform toolkit supporting text mode development on OS/2, Windows, DOS, SCO Unix and Linux/386 and GUI development on OS/2 and Windows. With Version 4.1 released in 1997 there was a huge improvement in the support for 32 bit OS/2 with improvements in the GUI front libraries and back end as well, although the Windows part of the system remained 16 bit. The GUI part of the development system was improved in particular. Version 4 brought a name change to Visual Prolog and some changes to the language, this may have been necessary in part since Prolog and traditional GUI's are not a natural fit, Prolog wants to go recursive in the background at every given opportunity while a GUI wants the back end of the program to wait for any input it may have. The main difference being that the VIP system is a bona fide business application development system with RAD generators, debuggers and everything else you need to ship a working code while like so many of the Unix derived tools used today, just getting Mercury to compile is a pain involving hops and intermediate C compilers, you can forget about debugging and rapid GUI development.
In some ways it strangely reminiscent of the more modern programming language Mercury that took a similar path of Wirth family/Prolog family language hybridisation to getting a usable compiled code out of a Prolog system that otherwise would be interpreted.
Sadly with version 6 and newer support for all development host and targets other than 32 bit Microsoft Windows NT derivatives was dropped although more modern versions have added 64 bit Windows as a targets as well.Īs for Visual Prolog as a programming language it is a strongly typed version of Prolog, best described as almost a hybrid of Prolog and Modula 2. Versions 5.x could notably cross compile to DOS, OS/2 and MS Windows 16 bit targets in addition to 32 bit OS/2 and MS Windows GUI and text mode targets with almost full source compatibility, in addition to the ability to compile Linux and SCO Unix text mode applications. Visual Prolog ( VIP) is a rapid application development system featuring an IDE, debugger, linker and a strongly typed Prolog native code compiler.
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