A WAM emulator

Appeared in Volume 6/3, August 1993

Keywords: WAM.

vanroy@prl.dec.com
Peter Van Roy
18th March 1993

If anyone is interested in implementing a WAM emulator, they can save themselves a lot of work by using anonymous FTP to get what's in:
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/plan/prolog/ucb/

It contains a WAM emulator written in C++ by Hervé Touati that includes a GC and some builtins, and a Prolog to WAM compiler written in Prolog. This software was used by Hervé to do the measurements reported in "An Empirical Study of the Warren Abstract Machine", published in SLP87.

Using the WAM is still the easiest way to get a reasonable Prolog system up and running from scratch. And it's simple enough that you can really get at the guts.