Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!munnari.oz.au!mudla!ok
From: ok@mudla.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: More fun with WG17
Message-ID: <2717@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 15 Nov 89 17:48:17 GMT
References: <2609@munnari.oz.au> <696@sce.carleton.ca> <2643@munnari.oz.au> <1355@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
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In article <1355@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>, cdsm@sappho.doc.ic.ac.uk (Chris Moss) writes:
> >Now in what sense did "New Zealand" (for example) _choose_ not to be
> >active in the Prolog standard?

> But, Richard, one of the principles dear to the hearts of Western
> democracies is the right of anyone NOT to participate if they don't want
> to. (Do we approve of compulsory voting?) NZ CHOSE not to participate.

There is no moral agent called "NZ".
The only sense in which it can be said that "NZ CHOSE not to participate"
is this:  "a group of people who control a certain bureacracy made a
general policy decision which resulted in the fact that NZ is not
represented on WG17, this decision was not made with reference to WG17
as such, and the result obtained without ANY of the Prolog programmers
actual or potential in NZ being consulted."  Put it this way, if George
Bush went raving mad and pushed The Button, we could say in precisely
the same sense that "the USA CHOSE to commit suicide".  This does not
seem to be a useful way of using the word "chose".

> In 1984 I hoped we might get a better
> language than what you call "Common Prolog". Now I'm older and have
> fewer illusions.

I'm not sure whether Chris Moss and I understand quite the same thing
by "Common Prolog".  Common Prolog is actually a pretty good programming
language.  I think we are all agreed that "Prolog as we know it" is not
an ideal logic programming language, and we're probably agreed that there
_ought_ to be a better one, but it is _not_ the job of the standards
committee to produce it.  My position on this has always been "freeze
Prolog as it stands so that people who want to _USE_ it can get on with
their work without having to wait N years for a new language to be designed".
As it is, in their pursuit of their individual Holy Grails, the BSI and ISO
committees have failed to produce *either* a better language *or* a workable
standard; even if they repent and start to do good work they must bear the
responsibility for having delayed the "good-enough" standard that was
feasible five years ago.

> But I'm not sure it would solve the problems while there is an ISO
> committee with a different agenda. Look at LISP. Now it's gone into the
> standards game all the old arguments (Scheme, core versions etc.) have
> got their supporters.

The Scheme standard is a completely different standard altogether.  The
last I heard (yesterday) it was supposed to be pretty nearly finished,
and not all that much different from the R3RS.  Whatever happens to the
Lisp standard, the people who worked on Common Lisp deserve praise for
having produced something that has FUNCTIONED as a standard since CLtL
came out.  Before CLtL, there was no way that you could expect to move
Lisp code from PC to Mac to VMS to UNIX to LispM.  Now, with all its flaws,
you _can_ do that.  Let's face it, what more could we expect from a standard?

Academics don't have to use standardised languages.  If you want to write
your next program in a mixture of Little SmallTalk and Perl, there is nothing
to stop you.  Standards are for engineers who are trying to build products
or prototypes for products.  They're for people who haven't got access to
the sources so they can't add missing features or port the thing to a new
machine themselves.  A standard has to be consistent, utterly clear, and
it has to describe something which is known to be workable even if it has
warts.  It also has to be timely:  if WG17 can just hang on for another 10
years no-one will _care_ what they do.