Plang (pronounced "P lang") is an experimental logic programming language, which borrows the backtracking search of Prolog, but with a completely different C-style syntax on top. The aim is to explore alternatives to traditional languages that can help make logic programming more attractive for practical programming tasks.
The sources for Plang are available from the project git repository.
Plang uses libgc to perform mark-and-sweep garbage collection on terms, clauses, and other engine control structures.
The libgc library is required and must be installed on your system prior to building Plang. Your GNU/Linux distribution probably already has a package for it: try "libgc" and "libgc-devel" (or "libgc-dev"). You will need the "devel" package to build Plang.
Plang can make use of the WordNet lexical database to provide access to huge amounts of information about English words. Natural language processing systems in particular can benefit from being able to ask "Is this a noun/verb/adverb/etc?".
Many GNU/Linux distributions have WordNet packages already. You can try installing "wordnet" and "wordnet-devel" (or "wordnet-dev") to see if your distribution already has WordNet. If not, download and build it from the sources at the above URL.
Note: WordNet support is optional in Plang, but highly recommended. If the "configure" script does not detect WordNet, then it will not build the "words" module. You will need the "devel" package installed to build Plang with WordNet.
Plang uses automake, autoconf, libtool, etc for its build system.
Once you have checked out the sources from the repository, type the following to build and install it under /usr/local on your system:
$ ./auto_gen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
You can also type "make check" to run the unit tests before the "make install" step to verify that Plang is working correctly.
The "make docs" rule will build the documentation. It is assumed that you have "doxygen" installed on your PATH to do this.
The Southern Storm blog is the main place to find announcements about Plang progress. Or contact the author via e-mail (use "git log" to find the e-mail address).