🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Apr26.081315.18922@canon.co.uk>, imlah@canon.co.uk (Bill Imlah) writes:
> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
> >Why in the name of sanity are
> >you abusing the word "functor" (which means a pair consisting of a
> >function symbol and an arity, e.g. fred/2) when you mean "term"?
 
> Surely its [sic] an [sic] common mistake.  Mostly people coming to
> grips with Prolog don't play around with terms enough 
> for the distinction to become salient.

But every argument to any Prolog predicate *is* a term.
The only way one can fail to "play around with terms" is to
write only predicates that have no arguments!

Surely the language itself makes it plain:  "functors" are the
things that "functor/3" gives you.  The DEC-10 Prolog manual
contained the statement "one may think of a functor as a record
type"; that's been copied into several manuals.  Do Pascal
programmers talk about individual records as "types"?

An explanation I _would_ believe is "shockingly bad teaching".
I am sick of Prolog text-books written by people who didn't bother
to learn the language.

-- 
Bad things happen periodically, and they're going to happen to somebody.
Why not you?					-- John Allen Paulos.