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From: bts@unc.cs.unc.edu (Bruce Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course
Message-ID: <1746@unc.cs.unc.edu>
Date: Sat, 24-Oct-87 12:42:23 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.1746
Posted: Sat Oct 24 12:42:23 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 26-Oct-87 01:58:04 EST
References: <321@ncrcam.Cambridge.NCR.COM> <589@hubcap.UUCP>
Reply-To: bts@unc.UUCP (Bruce Smith)
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 22
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.prolog:414 comp.ai:967

Turbo Prolog for an AI course?  Why not FORTRAN, for that matter?
Quoting (without permission) from Alan Bundy's Catalog of AI Tools:

    FORTRAN is the programming language considered by many to
    be the natural successor of LISP and Prolog for AI research.
    Its advantages include

	1. It is very efficient for numerical computation (many AI
	   programs rely heavily on number crunching techniques).

	2. AI programs tend to be very poorly constructed, meaning
	   that control needs to move frequently from one part of a
	   program to another.  FORTRAN provides a special mechanism
	   for achieving this, the so-called GOTO statement.

	3. FORTRAN provides a very efficient data structure, the
	   array, which is particularly useful if, for example, one
	   wishes to process a collection of English sentences each
	   of which has the same length.
______________________
Bruce T. Smith, UNC-CH
bts@unc.edu