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From: Shebs%UTAH-20@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.prolog
Subject: Prolog Syntax
Message-ID: <739@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-May-84 07:47:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.739
Posted: Tue May 29 07:47:06 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Jun-84 07:01:52 EDT
Lines: 24

From:  Stan Shebs 

The exchanges between Dave Bowen and Richard O'Keefe about Prolog
syntax are hard for me to understand.  As a Lisper I only approve
of syntax when certain constructs appear so frequently that it's
time to define a readmacro.  The nature of the readmacro definition
process is such that it's very difficult to overload any readmacro
character, so that almost no symbols ( the period being an exception)
have more than one meaning.  I should perhaps mention that the
PSL dialect of Lisp has long had an Algolized frontend called Rlisp,
and in fact most of the original PSL sources are still written in
Rlisp.  Despite all the syntax, Rlisp is much more difficult to read,
and is now only used by people doing lots of computational and
algebra work.  The moral?  Syntax is not such a Good Thing after all.
The Prolog Standard should be a fully parenthesized Prolog, with real
names for all of the builtin predicates.  Those who can't tear
themselves away from syntax, or who just love to have peculiar
symbols floating about their code, can spend their time building
elaborate parsers (but of course building a Prolog parser in
Prolog is easy, right?). I defy anyone to define a data and
program representation more general, elegant, and consistent than
s-expressions...

-- Stan Shebs