PAKCS: The Portland Aachen Kiel Curry System

Installation Instructions

The current version of PAKCS runs on Unix-based platforms and has been developed and tested under Linux (Debian/Ubuntu). However, it should also run on similar platforms like macOS. If you want to install and run the complete system on your computer, you need the following software:

SICStus-Prolog (Version 4.0 or higher) (recommended), or
SWI-Prolog (if you do not have SICStus-Prolog, but then the execution is less efficient)

If you install PAKCS from the source code distribution, you need also the Haskell build tool Stack (version 2.x or higher) to compile the front end of PAKCS, i.e., the executable stack must be in your path.

A note on encoding source files

PAKCS assumes that non-ASCII characters in source files are UTF-8 encoded. Therefore, the locale environment variable LC_ALL must be set to some UTF-8 encoding which will be used by the interactive environment, the compiler, and in generated executables. For instance, this can be achieved by setting

> export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8

before installing PAKCS.

How to generate and install the PAKCS kernel:

Go into the main directory of PAKCS (which contains this file). In the following, we assume that pakcshome is the name of this directory.
If you have the executables sicstus (for SICStus-Prolog) or swipl (for SWI-Prolog) in your path, execute make to install PAKCS.
Otherwise, values defining one of these executables can be passed as environment variables SICSTUSPROLOG or SWIPROLOG to make, e.g., by
```
make SICSTUSPROLOG=/opt/sicstus/bin/sicstus
```
or
```
make SWIPROLOG=/usr/bin/swipl
```
If both variables are undefined and the executables sicstus or swipl cannot be found, the PAKCS compiler system cannot be installed.
If you install PAKCS from the source code distribution, you need also the Haskell Tool Stack (version 2.x or higher) to compile the front end of PAKCS, i.e., the executable stack must be in your path.
After the installation, add the directory pakcshome/bin to your path, e.g., by the command
```
export PATH=pakcshome/bin:$PATH
```
in the bash.
If you do no want to have the specific version number of PAKCS included in your path, you can set a symbolic link like
```
ln -s pakcs-<version> pakcs
```
and put the directory pakcs/bin into your path. Now you can start the PAKCS compiler system via the command pakcs.
You can configure the behavior of PAKCS by various settings in a pakcsrc file. For doing so, copy the file pakcshome/pakcsrc.default as .pakcsrc (which will be automatically done when you start PAKCS for the first time) into you home directory and modify the settings in this file.
If you like to have support for line editing or history functionality in the PAKCS interactive environment (as supported by the readline library), you should have the Unix/Linux command rlwrap installed on your local machine. PAKCS uses rlwrap if it is invoked on a terminal without the parameter --noreadline.

Configuring the installation

If you want to install the system at a location different from the build location, you have to specify the intended installation location at built-time with the parameter PAKCSINSTALLDIR. Furthermore, the final installation location must not exist during built time. For instance, to built PAKCS at some local directory and move it later to /opt/pakcs, you can do it by

make PAKCSINSTALLDIR=/opt/pakcs
...
mv /path/to/pakcs /opt/pakcs

Changing system constants:

The distribution of PAKCS is configured with a maximal tuple arity of 15, i.e., Curry programs containing larger tuple sizes cannot be compiled. If you want to increase this size (usually, it is preferable to change your program), you have to change (in a source distribution of PAKCS) two system files and install your system as follows:

Change the definition of the constant maxTupleArity in the files pakcshome/frontend/src/Generators/GenAnnotatedFlatCurry.hs and pakcshome/src/compiler.pl according to your required maximal arity.
Delete all auxiliary files in the directory pakcshome/lib/.curry.
Re-install PAKCS by make.

Hints for specific platforms

Ubuntu 7.10

If you install PAKCS from the binary Linux distribution, the pre-compiled executable of the front-end might not find the library libgmp.so.3. This problem can be fixed by the following commands (executed as root):

cd /usr/lib 
ln -s libgmp.so.3.4.1 libgmp.so.3

If you use SWI-Prolog, you should install the packages swi-prolog as well as swi-prolog-clib from the Ubuntu distribution. The latter package is necessary if sockets, ports, and other system-oriented features should be used in Curry.

(Thanks to Sergio Antoy and Steffen Mazanek for these hints.)

Contact: Michael Hanus