"Patrick D. Logan" <···············@ccm.jf.intel.com> writes:
>And then there is all the Planner/Conniver/Whatever stuff that was taking
>place at MIT in the Lisp community concurrent with the development of
>Prolog.
I have no idea what Alain COlmerauer was aware of when he invented Prolog.
However, the idea of using logic for a programming language is pretty old;
I suspect that Golux (British) and Abset/Absys (Aberdeen) had some
influence. There were planning people at Edinburgh; there was a package
for Pop called Popler that was modelled on Conniver, and of course David
Warren wrote WarPlan and WarPlan-C to show that you could use Prolog for
planning quite easily. However, I do not believe that Planner/Conniver/
&c had any influence on Edinburgh Prolog; if they _had_, then Prolog
might have had forward chaining and a better mutable database. I was at
Edinburgh while David Warren, Lawrence Byrd, Fernando Pereira and Luis
Pereira worked on later versions of DEC-10 Prolog (and I even added a
feature myself), and by the time I arrived nobody looked at Planner or
Conniver for ideas.
--
"conventional orthography is ... a near optimal system for the
lexical representation of English words." Chomsky & Halle, S.P.E.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.