Subject: Re: prolog for Apple

From: Fred Dushin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 09:17:54 -0500

> I found the Open Prolog version on the net, and I downloaded it.
> Now the problem is, when I try it on my Apple, it doesn't recognize the
> format it's in.
> I have a translater to translate pc formats into apple formats, but
> since it doesn't recognize the format it's in, it can't translate it
> either.
> Maybe it is just a question of finding the right way to install it, or
> maybe the reason is that the Apple Mac i'm talking about is a ten year
> old one.

You need a program like Stuffit (freely available for macs) to convert the
file.  Generally, there are 3 kinds of "archives" for macs: .hqx files, which
are text encodings of binary data, .sit files, which are stuffit archives, and
.bin files, which are "macbinary" binary representations of Macintosh files. 
The issue with Macs is that macintosh files have two parts, a data fork and a
resource fork.  The resource fork is used to store arbitrary data in addition to
the file data, e.g., icons, filesystem information, even code.  Of any OS out
there, Apple actually got it right on this one (though they blundered just about
every other aspect of the OS); no need for stone-age MIME types, which we UNIX
and Windows users have come to accept as "standard".

When I used Macs years ago, I found OpenProlog to be a rather nice
implementation of Prolog.

Fred Dushin