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I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but in my case, I really enjoy the promise of "you write down the problem, not the solution". In an introductory prol
by bux93 2y ago
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but in my case, I really enjoy the promise of "you write down the problem, not the solution".
In an introductory prolog course you will soon find that when a prolog program is written to solve some problem like 'whats-the-next-chess-move' it's actually doing a depth first (and if you use the ! cut-operator, it will stop looking for any more solutions).
But in principle, it's up to the interpreter/compiler to decide how to find solutions. In the same way that a C compiler might say "ah, you're doing tail-recursion, let me make a loop out of that", a prolog compiler might say "gee, this problem looks like it would be much more efficient to use simulated annealing to find some answers in a shorter time". That's perhaps a bit far-fetched, but a great example is Datalog which has solvers that parallelize the search. You don't write a parallel algorithm, it's just that a parallel algorithm is used to solve your problem.
A specific feature I miss in other programming approaches is that if you can find the answer to the question "is A a child of B?", the very same code is also the function to find out all of A's children, or all of B's parents. No need to explicitly code a loop, or to create the inverse function.