Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!riley
From: riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Prolog, Lisp and Scheme for the Amiga
Message-ID: <6635@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 88 18:31:37 GMT
References: <10175@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley)
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 38

In article <10175@cup.portal.com> dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins) writes:
>     I would appreciate some comparative reviews of VTProlog, SBProlog,
>Scheme and XLisp 2.0, focusing on performance, completeness, and 
>suitability for my application.  If you feel it would be of any general
>interest (I do) then post here, otherwise just send me email.

The only version of VTProlog I saw didn't work.  I looked at the code for
a while, and decided that, even if it worked, it wouldn't be good for much.
Like SIOD (Scheme In One Defun), it's basically a toy, not a serious tool.

I haven't used SBProlog much, but it seems fairly complete.  You do need
more than a Meg to run it.  Not being much of a Prolog programmer, I really
can't say much about suitability for your application.

XLisp 2.0 is also fairly complete, and mostly Common Lisp compatible 
(except for the scoping rules), but it's on the slow side.  There's a lot
excess overhead, especially in the I/O and math.  I've been thinking about
trying to speed it up some, but haven't got far yet.

I like Ed Puckett's Scheme implementation a lot, but it doesn't have
floating point math.  If you need reals, then you'll have to look elsewhere.
Otherwise, it's great.  It doesn't have engines, or access to a timer
interrupt; it does have continuations, dynamic-wind, and lots of other
neat stuff.  It's reasonably fast, but the memory allocation/garbage
collection method is a bit of a hog (these two facts are correlated...).
The cleanliness and conceptual power of the Scheme language make it a 
good match for your application.  This would be my first choice for
language prototyping, but that may just be because I haven't really
learned Prolog yet...

None of these have been particularly AmigaIzed:  none of them offer access
to the system libraries, or any special Amiga features.  Source to Scheme
is not available (as far as I know); source for all the others is.

Hope this helps.

-Dan Riley (dsr@lns61.tn.cornell.edu, dsr@crnlns.bitnet)
-Wilson Lab, Cornell U.