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From: wagner@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course
Message-ID: <696@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Sat, 24-Oct-87 17:09:34 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.696
Posted: Sat Oct 24 17:09:34 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 26-Oct-87 05:28:22 EST
References: <321@ncrcam.Cambridge.NCR.COM> <589@hubcap.UUCP> <1746@unc.cs.unc.edu>
Reply-To: wagner@rocky.UUCP (Juergen Wagner)
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 27
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.prolog:416 comp.ai:971

Great! I believe, Bruce hit the right point. Teaching a programming
language whose conceptual structure is that different from what most
people think of programming languages, should not be done using almost a
counterexample of that paradigm. Some people are convinced that
TurboP#$@$ is a real Prolog (which might be true in their understanding
of AI languages), and there might be applications where sliding away
from PASCAL over TurboProlog to (REAL) Prolog (just to introduce changes
step by step), but it is definitively no good choice for teaching
typical AI programming techniques which (by their nature) require symbol
crunching rather than number crunching. And if I first have to write a
bundle of declarations before I find out that this highly nested and
flexible data structure I have in mind cannot be implemented that way,
this is not what I expect of such a programming language.

Sure, TurboP#$@$ is available on IBM/PCs. But there are also other nice
Prologs around, even a Public Domain one (SBProlog, mentioned in this
newsgroup some time ago). So, why not take a real Prolog even if it is
only line-oriented, and even if you have to write the main parts of your
programs outside Prolog with a conventional text editor? The idea of an
AI course should be to convey to basic principles and the special way of
thinking and reasoning about (so-called) AI problems. Exploring and
experimenting with programs gives a good impression of that.

Ok. No more flames about TurboP#$@$.

Juergen Wagner,			(USENET) gandalf@portia.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA