🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ALF.88Oct2184429@hathor.sics.se> alf@sics.se (Thomas Sj|land) writes:
>Statement 1, (commonly accepted, it seems, although the meaning is unclear):
>	 "Prolog is a declarative language"

Like "The USA is a democracy", it may be commonly accepted, but it isn't
true.  (The USA is, by design, a _republic_, not a pure democracy.)
It is possible to write a Prolog program in which most of the code can
be taken as declarative, just as it is possible to write pure functional
code in Lisp.  In both languages, it is a good idea to write pure code
whenever you can.  "Prolog is _based_ on a declarative language", perhaps.

>Statement 2, (viewpoint held by some experts who agree to statement 1):
>	 "functional languages are NOT declarative, while logic programming
>	  and equational languages are if they have completeness"

Please name these experts, so that I will know whose books to avoid!

I wonder whether there is any virtue in declarativeness as such, or whether
the real issue may not be hidden dependencies within a program?