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From: conway@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Thomas Charles CONWAY)
Subject: Re: Why hasn't Prolog Taken over the World?
Message-ID: <9433315.28601@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
References: <3a6lf4$mk5@mozo.cc.purdue.edu> <ROLAND.94Nov14142443@zith.sics.se>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 04:16:23 GMT
Lines: 23

roland@sics.se (Roland Karlsson) writes:

>> Why hasn't Prolog Taken over the World?
>
	[deletia]
>5. Lack of control over memory allocation.  This is a serious one!

I couldn't let this one pass! If Prolog implementations lack good
garbage collectors, then complain to the implementors. Automatic
memory management is one of the biggest strengths of the logic
and functional programming paradigms. A good proportion of the
bugs in C programs (particularly C programs) are memory management
related. In a logic or functional language, the implementor needs
to get it right only once, and then it works for everyone.

I believe there is also research that has demonstrated that the
amortised cost of automatic memory allocation is lower than the
cost of explicit memory management, but I don't know the references.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Conway                                           conway@cs.mu.oz.au
AD DEUM ET VINUM
