[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Andrew Coppin writes:
Ever tried implementing Haskell in Haskell? ;-)
Seriously:
Haskell is a *complicated* language, needing a parser, which by itself is
a non-trivial exercice.
It looks so simple on the surface...
[Actually, so does cold fusion.]
Read my whole message. What I was saying (in essence) is that Prolog
seemed to be performing "impossible" feats of logical deduction -
until I saw a unification algorithm implemented in Haskell, and then
it all made sense.
My deepest congratulations. It seems that you are the first person in my
pedagogical life, who got acquainted with the unification through its
implementation in Haskell.
Heh. Well. It took a *long* time, mind you... (BTW, that's a really
rather good book, that.)
Having said all that, I still don't "get" what the purpose of the
"cut" operator is.
Imagine that your life is a path through a tree. Depth first. At every
branching you choose a branch, and you continue. When you are stuck, you
remember that you have left a trail behind you, and you backtrack until
the last choice point. Then you choose another path, the previous being
marked as 'seen'.
Well, the cut is a commitment. You cut your way back, Now, you must
succeed,
i.e., find a terminal node which gives you what you want, or your failure
is definitive, you jump out of the system. There are hundreds of easy
examples of cuts, e.g., when descending the tree consumes the ressources
which cannot be restored.
So... it's the opposite of Parsec's "try" combinator?
I also failed to understand the Prolog syntax description. (What the
heck is an "atom" when it's at home? I thought an atom is a unit
composed of protons and electrons...)
Now, you are pulling my leg. An "atom" means that you cannot split it in
constituents, this name came from Lisp into other languages, but the
meaning comes from Democritus, who didn't know protons. I won't say
more, just that
if you want to be really funny, you should not forget neutrons.
Well, true. But they're so neutral! They don't even affect the chemical
properties of the atom, only its physical ones. ;-)
[Actually, I'm told this isn't *quite* true. For example, heavy water is
mildly toxic due to the atom radius being slightly different or
something which means that some enzyme somewhere doesn't quite work
properly any more, or similar...]
But anyway, I usually find that language syntax descriptions are written
for maximum crypticness... This is presumably to enhance the idea that
only extremely intelligent people can understand it or something.
I can certainly see why Prolog would be very useful for certain types
of problems. As it happens, not the kind of problems that usually
interest me. ;-)
Well, who am I or other readers to contradict it?...
My point was that learning more than one language
Do you have Any Idea how many programming languages I've learned and
used in my life so far? (Hint: lots.) ;-)
[Hell, I was bored one day so I learned PostScript in my lunch break...
Most normal people don't do that.]
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
