Re: AI, security, just wondering.

[Niklas Holsti <nholsti@icon.fi>]

dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> 
> In article <uf1zn88ijz.fsf@synquiry.com>,
>   Jon S Anthony <jsa@synquiry.com> wrote:
> > You can write anything in anything - theoretically.  But
> > you would be
> > digging yourself a large hole for no good reason doing
> > this sort of
> > stuff in Ada.  For example, you can write a reasonbly
> > featured and
> > quite reasonably efficient Prolog engine in CL in
    [snip]
> > As a reasonable estimate, doing the same
> > thing in Ada
> > would be >> 10 times the effort (though maybe not quite
> > 100 times).
> > What's more it wouldn't be much more efficient - if any.
> 
> This is complete nonsense in my view, it is perfectly
> reasonable to program AI problems in Ada. Even if you
> did wish to do it by first writing a prolog interpretor
> (an extremely dubious proposition), it is absurd to say
> that a prolog interpretor written in Ada would be much
> more than 50 pages of code.
> 
> The efficiency claim is also without substance.

Regarding the "dubious proposition", I know of one non-toy Prolog
system written in Ada. Around 1985-1988, a research project at
the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki,
wrote a fairly innovative Prolog system to support research in
modularisation of logic programs and LP implementation
techniques. The Helsinki Prolog system was implemented in
VAX/VMS Ada and included an interactive programming environment.

I don't have at hand data on its size or speed, but I did not
hear any negative rumours at the time, although I was in fairly
close contact with the principals. I'm sure the whole thing was
more than 50 pages, but of course it contained a lot more than
just the interpreter.

There may be some conference or journal papers on this system,
perhaps by Pekka Kilpel�inen or Esko Ukkonen.

The really interesting issue IMHO would be to explore ways to
integrate logic programming and functional programming with Ada.
After all, if an Ada application just needs to do some Prolog
processing, current O/S and middleware tools make it fairly
easy to create a loose coupling between the Ada program and
some existing Prolog processor. Only a tighter coupling would
motivate integrating the Prolog processor with the Ada program.