[2-10] Prolog extensions, meta-interpreters, and pre-processors

ProFIT (Prolog with Features Inheritance and Templates) is an extension
of Prolog with sorted feature structures (including multi-dimensional
inheritance), finite domains, feature search, cyclic terms, and
templates. ProFIT works as a pre-processor, which takes a file
containing a ProFIT program as input, and gives a file with a Prolog
program as output. Sorted feature terms and finite domains are
compiled into a Prolog term representation, and the usual Prolog term
unification is used at runtime, so that there is no slowdown through a
unification algorithm, and no meta-interpreter is needed. ProFIT uses
the same techniques for compiling sorted feature terms and finite
domains into Prolog terms as the Core Langauge Engine of SRI Cambridge
and the Advanced Linguistic Engineering Platform (ALEP 2.2) by the
European Community, BIM, and Cray Systems. ProFIT is not a grammar
formalism (although it is motivated by NLP), although it provides some
ingredients that are considered typical of grammar formalisms. The goal
of ProFIT is to provide these datatypes without enforcing any
particular theory of grammar, parsing or generation. ProFIT can be used
to extend your favourite Prolog-based grammar formalism, parser and
generator with the expressive power of sorted feature terms. Cyclic
terms can be printed out and a user-configurable pretty-printer for
feature terms is provided. ProFIT is available free of charge by
anonymous ftp from
   coli.uni-sb.de:/pub/profit/
and is implemented in Sicstus Prolog (2.1 #9). For more information,
write to Gregor Erbach, Univ. Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany
<erbach@coli.uni-sb.de> <http://coli.uni-sb.de/~erbach>.

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