A brief overall description
		     ===========================

VisAndOr is a tool originally  designed for  visualizing  the execution  of
parallel systems under X.  It was  designed with  the parallel execution of
logic  programming  languages  in mind.  As  such, VisAndOr  can  currently
represent  executions  of systems  supporting  independent  and-parallelism
(such  as  &-Prolog),  or  parallelism  (such  as  Aurora  and  Muse),  and
deterministic, dependent and-parallelism (such as Andorra-I).  Actually, it
can  also  represent  the  execution of  many  types  of parallel execution
provided it conforms to  a series of predetermined paradigms.  Examples are
"fork"  (as done by unix  processes),  "fork/join", etc. It is in an  early
stage of  development  and  will  be upgraded  often. We  hope  to  provide
improved visualization of all types of parallelism and their combinations.


			 Installing VisAndOr
			 ===================

Simply copy/move the executables in bin (see below) to some  place  on
your path.
				   
			    Using VisAndOr
			    ==============

The trace files for VisAndOr generally have the suffix ".vt".  The trace to
be visualized can be selected through  the  corresponding  VisAndOr's  menu
option or using the command line flag "-f".

In any of the trace directories containing ".vt" files try

visandor -f tracefile.vt

The  "must" visualizer for or-parallel systems is also included.  This tool
was  developed by J. Sundberg, C. Svensson, Roland Karlsson  and Khayri Ali
at SICS with influences also from early work at Argonne National Labs. Must
can be used on the  ".mt" traces. The two tools can  be connected  and they
will pass timing information to each other. To see how to do this try

vimust tracefile_without_extension

in the muse traces directory, where "tracefile_without_extension"  is  a
trace for which both a ".vt" and a ".mt" file exist.




		    Contents of this distribution
		    =============================

This distribution is composed by the following structure of
directories/files:


    visandor-0.5/README: This information file

    visandor-0.5/traces/andprolog: &-prolog traces (VisAndOr format).

    visandor-0.5/traces/aurora: Aurora traces (VisAndOr format).

    visandor-0.5/traces/muse: Muse traces (both VisAndOr and Must formats).

    visandor-0.5/traces/andorra1: Andorra-I traces (VisAndOr format).

    visandor-0.5/bin/visandor: VisAndOr executable.

    visandor-0.5/bin/vimust: script file for the synchronized work of Must and
        VisAndOr.   
 
    visandor-0.5/bin/must: Must executable.

    visandor-0.5/bin/bi: Bidirectional protocol executable (used by vimust). 

    visandor-0.5/doc/comm_protocol.txt: A description of the Must-VisAndOr
        communication protocol. C/C++ source code which implements
        that protocol is also provided. 

    visandor-0.5/doc/trace_format.txt: An informal description of the trace
        files used by VisAndOr. Trace files contain the recording of
        significant events which occurred during execution: these events and
        their format are described here.
    
    visandor-0.5/doc/visandor_iclp93.ps.Z: A compressed PostScript of the paper 
       "Some Paradigms for Visualizing Parallel Execution of Logic Programs",
       be presented at ICLP 93, Budapest. See also some other related papers
       about visualization and &-Prolog in anonymous ftp, directory
       /pub/papers.


			   Acknowledgements
			   ================

VisAndOr was  developed at the Technical University of  Madrid (Universidad
Politecnica  de  Madrid)  by   Luis  Gomez,   Manuel   Carro,  and   Manuel
Hermenegildo.  It is based on earlier tools developed by  Ross Overbeek and
Rusty Lusk at at Argonne National Labs and also uses ideas from a  previous
tool  developed  by  Roger  Nasr and  Manuel  Hermenegildo  at MCC and  the
University of Texas.

Tony Beaumont, Ines Dutra, and  David  Warren from U.  Bristol  and  Roland
Carlsson  from SICS have provided  valuable  comments  and  discussions  on
VisAndOr. We are grateful to them for their useful suggestions.



		 Comments, questions, bug-reports,...
		 ====================================

For any comments, bug-report, or further help please send e-mail to

Manuel Hermenegildo 
(herme@fi.upm.es)

Manuel Carro
(mcarro@fi.upm.es)