Prolog's Death (2010)

Re:Prolog's Death (2010) by YeGoblynQueenne on Friday May 10, 2019 @05:55PM (#19882616)

Prolog is not a good language for querying databases (if that's what you mean by "query language"). Foe one thing, it lacks a SELECT statement or list comprehensions and the like. If you want all results of a goal, you have to use one of the bagof/setof/findall predicates, or roll your own.

On the other hand, Prolog programs are logic theories (as are Prolog queries) and their executio is a proof. The range of programs that can be expressed in Prolog is the set of programs that are computable by a Turing machine. So yes, Prolog is a programming language. Whether it's "terrible" or not is up to personal taste.

I mean, I don't konw of an objective measure of what makes a programming language "terrible".

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Re:Prolog's Death (2010) by marcosdumay on Friday May 10, 2019 @10:01PM (#19884045)

Software has evolved on a direction where sending sets around is natural. That is no evidence that sending theorems around is problematic, it's just that current communication implementations happens to be very data-friendly and logic-unfriendly.

There is probably a very human reason for that, but mathematically both representations are perfectly replaceable.

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Re:Prolog's Death (2010) by guicho271828 on Friday May 10, 2019 @06:59PM (#19883069)

bagof/setof/findall ARE indeed list comprehensions, aren't they

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Re:Prolog's Death (2010) by gavanwoolery on Friday May 10, 2019 @06:45PM (#19882972)

agree with you - added clarification to my original comment :)

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