Optimal packing problems are fun 1-hour programming contest fodder - so many problems that you might solve in Prolog are trivially written imperatively or funct

Optimal packing problems are fun 1-hour programming contest fodder - so many problems that you might solve in Prolog are trivially written imperatively or functionally as combinatorial or permutational recursive searches with pruning This is true when the problem is stable and well-specified, but when constraints are being added and removed, when there are "nice-to-have" constraints that save money but may become less tractable as the problem scales, when customers want you to experiment with novel constraints -- you do not want to maintain a homebrew imperative implementation. (I can't say anything about a functional version.) Making your implementation maintainable is tantamount to re-implementing a powerful, general-purpose system such as Prolog.