From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII X-Google-Thread: 103376,30a335a9b2bdf7d4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Niklas Holsti Subject: Re: AI, security, just wondering. Date: 1998/11/15 Message-ID: <364F4B47.8F20F624@icon.fi>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 412167289 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit References: <36484B8C.84EEC61D@interact.net.au> <36484595.1189@ddre.dk> <72inmn$90h$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Organization: Space Systems Finland Ltd Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote: > > In article , > Jon S Anthony 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.