I was amused to disover recently (thanks to Zhou-san, at POPL) that
the name GHC (well, really FGHC or `flat' GHC) has already been used,
by the Japanese Fifth Generation Project.
FGHC stands for Flat Guided Horn Clause, and it's a language that was
used by the project for knowledge representation:
> Phase 1. During Phase 1, it was decided to explore an "And-Parallel"
> approach to parallel logic programming. To simplify, this means that
> the subgoals of a clause are explored in parallel with shared variable
> bindings being the means of communication. The process solving one
> subgoal can communicate with a process solving a sibling subgoal by
> binding a shared variable to a concrete value. It was also observed
> that subgoals would have to spread out across the network of
> processors constituting the parallel machine and that it would require
> careful control to avoid the buildup of communication bottlenecks. By
> the end of Phase 1, the form of the parallel kernel language was
> clarified: it was to be a flat guarded horn clause (FGHC) language. A
> previous JTEC study, JTEC Panel Report on Advanced Computing in Japan
> (Denicoff 1987), has already reported on this so we will be very brief
> in explaining the concept. A flat guarded horn clause consists of
> three parts: 1) head, 2) guard, and 3) body.
For those who want to know more, there's a discussion at
http://itri.loyola.edu/kb/c5_s3.htm
(from which the above is quoted) and some technical reports of the 5GP
at
http://www.icot.or.jp/AITEC/PUB/TR-TM/tr-list-E.html
For example, TR0766 (April 1992) is entitled "Message-Oriented
Parallel Implementation of Model Flat GHC".
One hopes they never trademarked the name...
--KW 8-)
