ECLiPSe is jointly owned by ICL and IC-Parc, which is an ICL-supported research centre at Imperial College. The system can be obtained by ftp from IC-Parc by emailing
eclipse-request@doc.ic.ac.uk
ECLiPSe runs under the Unix operating system (specifically SunOS 4 on Sun-4 hardware, Solaris on Sparc machines and Linux on PC's), and will be available under Windows-NT (version 4.0) by the end of 1997.
ECLiPSe is embeddable in C and C++ programs.
It is
available in the form of a linkable library, and a number of
facilities are available to pass data between the different
environments, to make the integration as close as possible.
Naturally facilities are also provided to allow ECLiPSe to invoke C
and C++.
A tightly integrated graphical system is very useful for program development, and ECLiPSe offers such an integration to the Tcl/Tk toolkit, which is public domain software available under Unix and Windows. Typically ECLiPSe is invoked from Tcl which is driven directly by user interactions. An example graphical environment for ECLiPSe developers is the graphical constraint environment Grace, available as an ECLiPSe library. Grace is implemented using ECLiPSe and Tcl.
The manuals and other documentation include a manual covering the
non-constraint facilities of ECLiPSe [Ae97], manuals
covering the facilities
supporting constraints [Be97, SNE97], and
information covering the graphical user
interface library, and embeddability in C and C++.
Background references can be found in the list of publications reachable from the IC-Parc home page at
http://www-icparc.doc.ic.ac.uk/