Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
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Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
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Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#2For those who are unfamiliar (as I was):
"The WAM is an abstract machine consisting of a memory architecture and instruction set tailored to Prolog. It can be realised efficiently on a wide range of hardware, and serves as a target for portable Prolog compilers."
(From the book's foreword.)
Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#3is the WAM the best virtual machine for prolog or are there out better and newer approaches?
Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#4is the WAM the best virtual machine for prolog or are there out better and newer approaches?
Also from the prologue,
"Although the WAM is a distillation of a long line of experience in Prolog implementation, it is by no means the only possible point to consider in the design space. For example, whereas the WAM adopts “structure copying” to represent Prolog terms, the “structure sharing” representation used in the Marseille and DEC-10 implementations still has much to recommend it."
Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#5A few years back I was working on a WAM to LLVM compiler as a way to learn LLVM. Never fully finished my implementation, but this book really was an amazing reference. I particularly enjoyed the way the "tutorial style" that built up starting from a very simple language and explaining the design choices being made while extending the language to eventually become Prolog.
I don't know where the code is now, maybe I should make a point of digging it up and fixing it up to work with a recent versions of LLVM.
Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#6I spent a lot of the early 80s writing Prolog, first on DEC-10 Prolog and then on Quintus Prolog. Too bad this great document was not available back then!
Re: Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction (1991) [pdf]
#7is the WAM the best virtual machine for prolog or are there out better and newer approaches?
There was substantial research in the 80s and 90s yield a few abstract machines for prolog. Most of them derived from the WAM I believe. See http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/PRL-RR-36.pdf