I received my test post to the ProofPower mailing list, so I better do myself
what I asked everyone else to do! So here is my reply! Perhaps I should give a
brief update on events since the list started to malfunction:
ProofPower is alive and well and in use by D-RisQ and others. It has reached
that rare state for a software system of becoming relatively stable: by and
large, it does what the current user community want and they are mostly
building on top of it rather than needing to burrow inside it. (It is a sad
comment on software engineering that stable is considered by many to imply
moribund. I do not share that opinion.)
One bit of burrowing inside instigated by the developers rather than the users
began a few years ago: an experimental port of ProofPower to use Unicode and
UTF-8 for mathematical symbols in place of the ad hoc character set that we had
to invent for ourselves years ago. Roger Jones did some excellent work towards
this end and made a version of the document processing tools that would compile
all the ML code from UTF-8 sources using the old character set as an
intermediary. I ported the user interface program xpp based on his work, but it
has proved problematic to port all that we did to Linux: we were developing on
Mac OS and, sadly, the Free BSD wchar_t libraries are much less restrictive
than the Gnu libraries and it seems to need a lot more work on the document
processing utilities (that are written in C) to get round this. [As an aside: I
wanted to continue to support the Cygwin platform and there seems to be little
hope for full support for UTF-8 on gcc in Cygwin.] I have more r
ecently got the xpp port working on Linux, but not the rest of the system. So
that development is in abeyance. I hope to lock horns with this strand of work
again in the not too distant future.
Best regards,
Rob.
> On 6 Nov 2023, at 00:54, Rob Arthan wrote:
>
> This is an attempt to investigate what happened to the ProofPower mailing
> list and to see if I can bring it back to life.
>
> If you get this message please reply.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rob.
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