Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!pipex!uunet!world!amzi
From: amzi@world.std.com (Amzi!)
Subject: Re: Why hasn't Prolog Taken over the World?
Message-ID: <CzqBx4.H4G@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
References: <3a6lf4$mk5@mozo.cc.purdue.edu> <3aal5c$b4d@ra.nrl.navy.mil> 	<citrin-1511941431140001@ecemac-citrin.colorado.edu> 	<3ai0ps$rmq@beta.qmw.ac.uk> <dcfCzI6wB.9pH@netcom.com> 	<CzIxzu.IxL@world.std.com> <ALF.94Nov20171132@anhur.sics.se>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 16:46:16 GMT
Lines: 51

alf@sics.se (Thomas Sj|land) writes:

>>But, Prolog is an ideal tool as a component of a larger application 
>>(written in C, Basic or Cobol).  Then, you can use Prolog for the things 
>>it does best: search, pattern matching, multiple constraints, etc. and 
>>use C/Basic for the rest of the application.  Used in this way Prolog 
>>becomes like any other database, graphics or other library/API.  It is a 
>>service for the main application to call upon when advice, diagnosis or 
>>other logic functions are needed.

>My 2 cents: 
>Logic programming environments, like those of other languages
>developed in the 70s and 80s has in my opinion a serious problem
>(apart from their often inherent single-threadedness): 

>- It is often difficult to write small programs that load quickly and
>perform a simple task without interaction with a "top level".  More
>efforts must be put into interoperability and GUI-integration so that
>small handlers for various tasks are at least as natural to write in a
>logic programming language as in C/C++ or BASIC. It would be nice if all
>different dialects adopted similar abstractions for these aspects, of
>course.

>There is also a need for more "success applications", i.e. programs (partly)
>written in Prolog, that perform tasks that are accepted as important by
>the majority of developers who couldn't care less for theoretical elegance.
>The example mentioned sounds like an interesting one.

>Apart from this, access to a good development system at a reasonable price
>is crucial. You must be able to write programs that can be distributed
>without requiring licences for the full development environment.

We've got exactly what you want.  We can load small programs quickly, you 
can easily issue any kind of query (as you can do from the listener) and 
get the Prolog variables mapped back to C/C++ or Basic.  And the full 
system with royalty-free runtime distribution is $298.

Mary Kroening

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