Olivetti Corp of Japan, in which the Italian holds 80% and Toshiba Corp the remaining 20%, has started marketing XL, a knowledge-based systems development language – rather than just a shell – licensed by Olivetti from Intelligent Systems Research Pty Ltd of Melbourne, Australia: the language will initially be marketed on the Sun Microsystems Inc Sun-3 workstations Toshiba buys OEM from the Mountain View company and sells as the AS3000 line, and possibly later on Olivetti’s own workstation, which is rumoured to be in the pipeline for launch in Japan next year; following the source code licence Olivetti signed with the Australian company for an initial $200,000, the Ivrean has been working with the Victorian for around 18 months, converting XL to run in Japanese and customising it for Japanese market requirements; the XL language has already been used to develop systems in various industrial environments in Japan, the most recent including a fault-tree analysis expert system for nuclear power stations developed by Dr Kumamoto, of the Engineering Faculty of Kyoto University.
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