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From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell)
Newsgroups: net.lang.prolog
Subject: "name" and type conversion
Message-ID: <382@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Nov-85 15:26:00 EST
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.382
Posted: Tue Nov 19 15:26:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 05:42:45 EST
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 20

In playing around with Poplog, we had a program which would sometimes
read in integers, but they were read in as atoms (because at the point
of reading in we weren't sure whether we would be reading in atoms or
integers).  For instance, we would have the atom '12', which was not the
same as the integer 12.  We wanted to convert such atoms into integers.
We were about to play around with all kinds of complicated schemes for
conversion (or with doing something like a "peek" at the input stream),
when one of our programmers discovered that the following succeeds:
	...name ('12', X), name (Y, X), integer (Y)...
In other words, running such an atom into and then back out of "name"
converts it from an atom to an integer!

Now this is a very handy thing to have.  However, I suspect that it's
not supposed to work that way, and probably doesn't in other Prologs.
Any comments?  Does anyone have another (simple) way of doing such a
conversion?
-- 
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center
	...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm