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Prolog compared with LISP?

Richard O’Keefe

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Abstract

In the recent ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming, there was a paper with the title "Prolog Compared With LISP" [2] . In it, Gutierrez presents a program in LISP, and a related program in Prolog, and uses the inferior performance of the latter to suggest in strong terms that advocates of Prolog may have over-stated its performance. However, his program makes very poor use of Prolog. In this article, I point out which features of Prolog have been misused and give guidelines for their proper use. I also compare a new Prolog and LISP program performing a similar task, and find that the execution times are comparable. This is in accord with earlier results [4].

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What this paper is about

In the recent ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming, there was a paper with the title "Prolog Compared With LISP" [2] . In it, Gutierrez presents a program in LISP, and a related program in Prolog, and uses the inferior performance of the latter to suggest in strong terms that advocates of Prolog may have over-stated its performance. However, his program makes very poor use of Prolog. In this article, I point out which features of Prolog have been misused and give guidelines for their proper use. I also compare a new Prolog and LISP program performing a similar task, and find that the execution times are comparable. This is in accord with earlier results [4].

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Available abstract

In the recent ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming, there was a paper with the title "Prolog Compared With LISP" [2] . In it, Gutierrez presents a program in LISP, and a related program in Prolog, and uses the inferior performance of the latter to suggest in strong terms that advocates of Prolog may have over-stated its performance. However, his program makes very poor use of Prolog. In this article, I point out which features of Prolog have been misused and give guidelines for their proper use. I also compare a new Prolog and LISP program performing a similar task, and find that the execution times are comparable. This is in accord with earlier results [4].

Key concepts: Lisp, Prolog, Programming language, Computer science, Task (project management), Point (geometry), Scheme (mathematics), Mathematics

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