Prolog

I see that there are still occasional postings in this group about
Prolog being good or bad, or not as good as one might want, or gooder
than this or badder than that other language. These postings are of
course most valuable, but they don't really tell us anything we didn't
know before. Prolog is both wonderful and awful, just like any other
language. Taking Prolog as it is, the way we might take president
Bush as he is, or the Dalai Lama as he is, how can we best understand
and make use of Prolog? This is the kind of question that the
newsgroup might most profitably address.

For myself, I like Prolog because I have slipped into the habit of
implementing potentially complicated algorithms in Prolog,
specifically the SICStus variant, in which I don't need to worry about
how large natural numbers there are. Prolog tweaks my nose about
constructing an enormous number of data structures, while allowing me
to babble on pretty freely about how I want things to be.

Prolog is good for some things and useless for other things. In
this, it's just like you or me, or life itself.

Torkel Franzen wrote:
> I see that there are still occasional postings in this group about
> Prolog being good or bad, or not as good as one might want, or gooder
> than this or badder than that other language. These postings are of
> course most valuable, but they don't really tell us anything we
didn't
> know before. Prolog is both wonderful and awful, just like any other
> language. Taking Prolog as it is, the way we might take president
> Bush as he is, or the Dalai Lama as he is, how can we best understand
> and make use of Prolog? This is the kind of question that the
> newsgroup might most profitably address.
>

It is the most profitable, if your objective is implement somethings in
prolog, and you want to learn methods, algorithms, ...
If your objective is to analize the current state of computer
languages, see their evolution, the missing things, and think about how
to go to better languages, then, it is more important that you call
"good or bad".
In particular, for my own objectives, it is very more important a post
like "Knowledge based programming" than the answer to a student that
doesn't knows
how to implement a recursive rule.

Only a choice of preferences.

On 10 Apr 2005 13:13:51 +0200, Torkel Franzen <torkel@sm.luth.se>
wrote:

>
>  I see that there are still occasional postings in this group about
>Prolog being good or bad, or not as good as one might want, or gooder
>than this or badder than that other language...

With respect to what criteria?...

A.L.

A.L. <alewando_tego_nie@hotXXXX.com> writes:

> With respect to what criteria?...

Various criteria, I suppose.

Torkel Franzen wrote:
> A.L. <alewando_tego_nie@hotXXXX.com> writes:
>
> 
>
>
>   Various criteria, I suppose.

Maybe Torkel's answer deserves some (unsollicited) explanation.

Read carefully what Torkel wrote originally: he is not making himself
any claims about Prolog being good/gooder, bad/badder in the sentence
that A.L. reacts to; he is making a statement that others did so.

Asking Torkel about the criteria that others have used when making such
statements is ill-directed: you can't expect Torkel to put effort in
retrieving this implicit or explicit information. It would take him the
same effort as anybody else, unless he remembers or has made a specific
archive.

Cheers

Bart Demoen