Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Review of "The Craft of Prolog"
Message-ID: <4744@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 11 Feb 91 07:29:20 GMT
References: <5771@swi.swi.psy.uva.nl> <4710@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <1991Feb7.183637.2783@ida.liu.se>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 20

In article <1991Feb7.183637.2783@ida.liu.se>,
felkl@aste16.Berkeley.EDU (Feliks Kluzniak) writes:
[I wrote]
> |> Perceptive!  Dijkstra's writings have influenced me a lot.
> 
> To this I would like to add the following quotation ("The Craft of
> Prolog", p.333):
> 
> "Given that we usually have to put in a lot of time stepping through a
> program when we are debugging it...."

Curses.  This is where the derivation of much of the book from a collection
of "addenda to C&M" -- as I originally thought of them -- shows through.
The *context* of the sentence does reveal my debt to Dijkstra, because it
is a plea for "separation of concerns" (first make it right, then make it
fast).  The sentence should not be taken as implying that it is normal for
Prolog code to require a lot of debugging; it should be read as "if&when".

-- 
Professional programming is paranoid programming