Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Benchmark Programs
Message-ID: <4051@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 23 Oct 90 06:45:08 GMT
References: <1744@ecrc.de>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 34

In article <1744@ecrc.de>, micha@ecrc.de (Micha Meier) writes:
> I've learned that some people are afraid to make their programs
> available because they think that their programs are not written
> in a good style and they are also afraid of R.A.O'Keefe's comments.

The second fear should be easy to allay.  I am not at ECRC.  Send a
file to Micha Meier and I am most unlikely to see it.  There is nothing
to fear.  On the other hand, I believe that the first fear is legitimate:

> Prolog has not a very good reputation in the CS field
> (I was actually quite surprized when I found out at the last
> IFIP Congress that very few of the people there take Prolog seriously),
> one reason for that is certainly its slowness.

I repeat what I've been saying for years:  I do not find Prolog to be a
particularly slow language.  What I *have* found is that a great many
Prolog programs are quite excruciatingly bad.  (Example:  a program I
am tweaking right now evaluates arithmetic expressions by parsing them
out of strings *at run time* (this is in Turbo Prolog, which seems to
encourage this sort of waste) and maintains a stack in the dynamic
data base instead of just passing numbers as parameters.)

> Please, if you believe in Prolog, help us to make it better,
> we need your programs, be it good or bad.

In particular, may I suggest that if your program _is_ bad, you have
something to _gain_ by exposing it:  you may be told how to do it
better.  And if you don't want people commenting on it, all you have
to do is put a notice in your code 
	%  Please do not comment on the style or efficiency
	%  of this program.

-- 
Fear most of all to be in error.	-- Kierkegaard, quoting Socrates.