NOTICES FOR IFS KL1 PROGRAM EXECUTION ON KLIC

IFS (ICOT Free Software) contains KLIC, which is the KL1 execution environment running on UNIX. However, almost all KL1 programs currently distributed as IFS are supposed to be able to use PIMOS as their execution environment. PIMOS is the operating system for Multi-PSI and PIM. It must be noted that KLIC provides an execution environment different from that provided by PIMOS.

KLIC is different from PIMOS in functionalities, execution speed, and the size of memory that can be used. Therefore, KL1 programs which are written to execute on PIMOS may or may not be executed on KLIC without some modification. Since large-scale KL1 programs that are distributed as IFS intensively use PIMOS functions, porting them to KLIC is fairly difficult. KLIC versions of some of the software in IFS will be released in near future.

Porting KL1 programs to KLIC may require some modification at the source code level --- the amount of modification actually depends on the contents and the sizes of KL1 programs. Sometimes just a fragment of a KL1 program may be executable on KLIC. There are several important issues to port KL1 programs from PIMOS to KLIC.

1. The current version of KLIC does not support floating point numbers, although there is a plan.
2. KLIC does not support several of the built-in predicates in PIMOS version of KL1.
3. There are several differences in the specification of macros. For instance, user defined macros are not usable on KLIC.
4. Basically, PIMOS system calls cannot be used on KLIC. Furthermore, the specification of I/O is different as well.
5. The specification of character strings is different.
6. Integer data have only 28 bits on 32-bit machines and 60 bits on 64-bit machines, while they have 32 bits on PIMOS.