[ILUG] LISP & Prologue

[Kenn Humborg]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 12:10:37AM +0000, Ross Lynch wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Just a few _basic_ questions about LISP & Prologue...
> 
> Which is easier first off? Also, how are they in terms of easyness and
> comparibility with respect to C? And lastly, _is_ Linux the best
> environment for programming 'em in? (unbiased answers expected ;)).

According to some LISP is the language of the gods.  It's simple,
powerful and very easy to write compilers/interpreters for.

Prolog (no -ue at the end) is a different beast completely.
It requires you to turn your brain inside out before you 
start programming it.  It's an inference language.  You tell
it stuff (like John is big, Mary is small, Pat is small).
Then you ask if it a statement is true (is John small?),
or what values satisfy a statement (Who is small?).

Or something like that...  I read a book on it once years ago
and a friend of mine had a final year project to write a 
symbolic calculus package (like Maple/Mathcad/Mathematica) 
in it.  He said it drove him mad!

As for programming environments, I imagine that you don't really
get IDEs for these guys (or if you do, you probably pay big
wanda).  They are interpreted, so you'd spend most of your time
either playing around in the interpreted environment, or
editing files to feed into the interpreter.  In that case,
you just need a decent text editor (unbiased answers _not_
expected...).

Later,
Kenn