In article ·····@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>Anyway, this sure is far away, not only from Ada, but also from the subject,
>since, as I have pointed out before, the 5G project had very little to do
>with programming languages. It did place an emphasis on Prolog (a decision
>which seemed pretty peculiar to the AI folks at the conference, and was
>widely assumed at the time to be a deliberate "we'll be different from the
>US guys who use Lisp" type of decision). At the time they made all sorts
>of glib statements about Prolog along the lines of "Prolog is pretty nice,
>but lacks data abstraction and module capability, but never mind, we'll
>create a marvellous new Prolog that solves these problems". Not much has
>come of that either.)
I disagree. As the March 1993 issue of Communications of the
ACM suggests, perhaps the most significant thing to come out of
the Japanese Fifth Generation project was the concurrent logic
language GHC. Arguably smaller teams far less generously funded,
in England and Israel, managed to achieve much the same working
in parallel on the same ideas, and certainly the initial aims
of the 5G project were vague and over-ambitious. However, having
programmed AI and parallel processing problems in a variety of
languages before coming across GHC and its fellow concurrent
logic languages, I would not now switch over to any other
language unless forced. My view is that the concurrent logic
languages like GHC do for parallel processing what the first
high-level languages did for sequential programming. If nothing
comes of them it will be a shame and a set-back to computer
science equivalent to that when horrible languages like FORTRAN
and Cobol achieved dominance over Algol, a mistake which it has
taken some twenty years to put right through the gradual shift
to the Algol-descended C.
Matthew Huntbach