🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1226@indetech.uucp>, david@emerald.UUCP (David Kuder) writes:
> I think your use of B&D just got too broad.

I was *wondering* how long it would be before some nettled Prolog partisan
spoke up...:-)

>                                             Every language has a paradigm,
> Prologs may be other than procedural but it isn't any more constricting than
> C or LISP.

You couldn't prove that by me, friend -- or by half the Prolog programmers I
know! This much I'll give Prolog, that it's at least compulsive about some
interesting and useful ideas. More so than APL. *Much* more so than Pascal.

>            As far as it goes, it has always struck me as freeing rather than
> binding.

Well, yes -- *if* the things that you care about can be modeled by Horn
clauses. The trouble is that there are lots of important things that cannot,
that are intrinsically stateful/sequential/procedural. Consider I/O, for
example, carefully.

> Speaking of *obvious* examples, what isn't a B&D language?

C. C++. Lisp. Basic. Fortran. Any assembler. These languages escape the
category by including enough low-level primitives to support just about any
programming style that's even vaguely procedural; of course, you may have to
give up a lot of the language's expressive power to do so.

Smalltalk and (possibly) Algol-68 escape the category because, although they
are wedded to particular programming paradigms, they include enough power
and extensibility that you can customize your way out from under the designers'
assumptions if you need to.

>                                                            Is there a better
> way of differentiating it from, for example, APL than calling one B&D?

Sure. Does a language simply *support* some bizarre and interesting way new of
thinking about algorithms, or does enforce the method with such religious
fervor that you can't do anything else, *even though the method is demonstrably
inadequate for general-purpose programming*?
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