Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
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From: pereira@alta.research.att.com (Fernando Pereira)
Subject: Re: Time for a standardized, pure, "modern" successor to Prolog?
In-Reply-To: fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU's message of Mon, 29 May 1995 07:42:39 GMT
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Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 23:19:29 GMT
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In article <9514917.13672@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
   I think the problem is there is a lack of concensus in the logic
   programming community.

   The functional programming community (or at least the Haskell community)
   were in agreement about some fundamental things: the lambda calculus
   as the underlying theoretical model, a strong Hindley/Milner style type
   system, lazy evaluation.
This last paragraph is tautological: the Haskell community are exactly
those people that were in agreement. If you add SML and CAML as well
as the new ML-2000 effort, and further afield Scheme, there's at least as
much lack of consensus in the FP community as in the LP community as
to what a "modern" language should be like.

Language design by committee rarely works, with a few exceptions
(eg. Algol 60, SML) in which the committees were small, technically
outstanding and shared many of the same assumptions to start with.
--
Fernando Pereira
2B-441, AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Ave, PO Box 636
Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636
pereira@research.att.com
1-908-582-3980


