Centaur in the future?!

[jmi@columbo.inria.fr (Janet Bertot)]

Dear Centaur Users,

One of the possible areas of improvement, as all you Typol users are 
acutely aware, is to change the Prolog engine used by Typol.  The current
prolog, Mu-Prolog, is linked with centaur and the memory allotted is
specified statically (the wonderful GSTKLEN variable), with Sepia(*) prolog
memory is dynamically allocated.  Thus it is clear moving to Sepia would
be an improvement for the Typolites among us.  However, Sepia is available
*only* on Sun machines.  This is not good for our users with Silicon Graphics
or Decstations.

Yet, the news is not all bad, recall with the current Centaur 1.2 that 
emacs and certain parsers are separate processes.   Similarly, Sepia is in
fact a separate process.  Thus, the situation improves to: if you have Decs
or SGs, *but* you have access to a Sun on your network, then you can run
Centaur on whatever machine you like and have Sepia on the Sun, thus being
able to profit from all that Centaur has to offer.

While this is not a perfect solution, my questions to everyone are as 
follows: 

	o Are you currently using Typol and, if so, do you run centaur
	  on a Sun or some other platform?!

	o Does your local network provide access to Sun machines, i.e.,
	  would you be able to run a Centaur with a Sepia Prolog engine,
	  or not?! 

	o Is there a problem for your projects if Centaur goes in this 
	  direction?!

Looking forward to your response to these questions.  Of course, i welcome
any comments, thoughts, or questions.


			regards
			janet bertot


------------
(*) Sepia 3.0 is also now known under the name Eclipse 3.3 and 
    hails from ECRC (European Computing Research Center) in Munich.