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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: standards, Scheme, Prolog
Message-ID: <4962@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 14 Jun 91 18:49:37 GMT
References: <3876@n-kulcs.cs.kuleuven.ac.be>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 25

In article <3876@n-kulcs.cs.kuleuven.ac.be> bimbart@hera.cs.kuleuven.ac.be (Bart Demoen) writes:
>In <6209@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> R. O'Keefe writes:
>
>> I think it would be an excellent thing if more of the people
>> concerned with the Prolog standard understood the language they
>> were standardising.  In particular, one would expect the
>> formal specification of Prolog to be _about_ the same size as
>> the formal specification of Scheme.
>
>I am afraid I can only understand this the following way:
>
>	people involved in the formal specification of Prolog do not
>	understand the language they are standardizing

He meant that _some_ of them do not understand the language they
are standardizing.

One also gets the impression that the formal specification is
rather large.  That would be a shame, because Prolog is a fairly
small language.  As for comparison with Scheme, it may be that 
the formal spec for Prolog covers more of the language than does
the formal spec for Scheme.  (I do not mean to imply that the
formal Scheme spec is for a subset.  But there are many things,
including such trivia as the member function, that have not been
explicitly formalized.)