Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!rutgers!okstate!norman From: norman@a.cs.okstate.edu (Norman Graham) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Unification of Paradigms Summary: The relationship between unification and function invocation. Message-ID: <3938@okstate.UUCP> Date: 21 Sep 88 15:49:40 GMT References: <3923@okstate.UUCP> <8943@srcsip.UUCP> Organization: Oklahoma State Univ., Stillwater Lines: 44 From article <8943@srcsip.UUCP>, by shankar@srcsip.UUCP (Subash Shankar): > First, unification > is much more general then function invocation, for obvious reasons. I did not have in mind the replacement of unification with function invocation. I was thinking of unification as a function from assertions and goals to answers. Of course, what I intended in the original posting was to incorporate basic ideas from other paradigms into the paradigm that I'm most comfortable with (ie. procedural). I've only now become aware of that intention, and can now see the blind spot that it caused. (Incidentally, I am saddened by the crippling of procedural languages by static type systems; lack of first class citizenship for all objects; inability to specify things such as lazy or eager evaluation, the environment to operate in, and to use a store or not; and the lack of higher order type systems. The current procedural languages can be extended a great deal before they cease to be procedural.) > Now, if you were to say that functions only provide syntactic sugar for a > handful of predicates written in logic languages, I would probably agree :-) You may smile, but you raise a case that I had not considered. Now it looks like we have four choices: 1) function invocation and unification exit as independent concepts, side-by-side in the language. 2) functions are implemented as some sort of restricted unification. 3) unification is implemented as a function. 4) function invocation and unification do not exist in the same language. In the future, I'll take O'Keefe's advise and not pontificate about topics I know I know nothing about. But since we're already going on this topic, let's beat it around a bit. -- Norman Graham Oklahoma State University Internet: norman@a.cs.okstate.edu Computing and Information Sciences UUCP: {cbosgd, ihnp4, 219 Mathematical Sciences Building rutgers}!okstate!norman Stillwater, OK 74078-0599