The Power of Prolog

Re:The Power of Prolog by marcosdumay on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:14PM (#22824808)

Unfortunately, it's not. There is almost no problem that requires searching through some complex enough space for a specialized language be worthy its use, and yet have a small enough search space for zero knowledge depth-first search to be viable. (Database querying may be the one large problem, there are some comments about Datalog already.)

There are some modern Prolog versions that try to use some better searching algorithms, but the language hinders that change.

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Re:The Power of Prolog by tom_mellior on Friday April 10, 2020 @03:27AM (#22830791)

> There is almost no problem that requires searching through some complex enough space for a specialized language be worthy its use

Whether or not this is true, Prolog is so much more than just "searching". Unification gives you all the powers of pattern matching in functional languages, but adds a lot of extra power on top of that. For anything working with tree-shaped or even DAG-shaped data, Prolog is an excellent choice.

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Re:The Power of Prolog by marcosdumay on Monday April 13, 2020 @08:54AM (#22855404)

I do risk saying that if you are not doing search, then Prolog gives you way too much power.

I have spent much more time looking for unexpected exponential runtime than the time it takes to implement the code without unification. That's the main reason I abandoned the language.

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