Some of these types of problems can indeed be turned over to a constraint solver. I'd love to see a comparison with Prolog. Has anybody tried it? The problem t

Some of these types of problems can indeed be turned over to a constraint solver. I'd love to see a comparison with Prolog. Has anybody tried it? The problem that I see with Prolog in this case is that a simple solution is simple because it is turning the search over to Prolog's built in constraint solver that knows nothing of the problem. This often leads to unacceptable performance with Prolog; performance problems can sometimes be addressed in practice by the appropriate placement of the cut operator within the logical specification of the constraints. This, at least in my experience, makes understanding what the program is doing very difficult. Generally, I view Prolog (along with languages like Smalltalk) as a language appropriate for some problem domains that have come to the end of their lifetime because mainline, more generally useful, languages have adopted their features or incorporated them in libraries.