Blast from the Past

Rsadeika

Today I was cleaning out a box, that was in the basement, with lots of mouse droppings. First thing I came across was a Dr.Dobb's Journal Sept 1983, Annual Forth Issue. Not sure why I was saving that issue. Second find, Dr.Dobb's Journal March 1985, Special Prolog Issue. The box also contains a lot of dot matrix printouts of things like xmodem.asm. Did not look through all of the printouts yet.

The Fourth issue has articles like "A 68000 Forth Assembler", "Nondeterministic Control Words in Forth", "GO in Forth". I will have to read these articles just get an idea of what they are talking about. An interesting ad that I came across was for a S-100 64K Static RAM Memory board for $629.00. WOW.

Now the second issue, Special Prolog Issue, that is tied in with AI. What the heck is Prolog. One of the articles is "Tax Advisor: A prolog Program Analyzing Tax Issues", very interesting. Today when their is discussion about AI, I have not heard Prolog being mentioned.

Now I am wondering what else I will discover in those dot matrix printouts.

Ray

localroger

Prolog was mostly superceded by LISP for that sort of application.

Rsadeika

Yesterday, I downloaded some Prolog tutorials, just to see what the heck Prolog was all about. After looking at some of the examples, I started thinking, this sure looks like or resembles SQL language.

After doing some further reading, yes, SQL was created for working with databases. The creators of SQL thought that Prolog was geared for the academics, and would not be received all that well with the business community.

It seems that, once you get proficient in Prolog, it is way more powerful than SQL. After looking at the Prolog examples, they look and feel kind of cryptic, but I hope it is deceptive at first sight.

So, Eric Smith, maybe Prolog could be added to FlexGUI. :-)

Ray

Genetix

Rsadeika,

In logic class we used Turbo Prolog and I still have the program though you will need DOSBox to run it, assuming you have a PC.