glenm@athena.UUCP (Glen McCluskey) (04/24/86)
Has anyone out there used Turbo Prolog? If so, what do you think of it? Does it implement the de facto Prolog standard, described in Clocksin and Mellish's book? Glen McCluskey ..tektronix!athena!glenm
emv@umix (04/28/86)
I ordered it as soon as the little blue Borland flyer showed up in my mailbox, but as of yet no sign of it. (It hasn't been a month yet, maybe a few weeks? I lose track of time near finals.) The local Software City says they have been told early May. Remember how long the lead-in time was on SuperKey? Ads started well before they had a finished product to ship. I do believe that it's coming, and though I'm in no great hurry I'd like to see it within the next week or two at least. Edward Vielmetti University of Michigan Computing Center MicroGroup emv@umix.uucp emv%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-Multics.ARPA
koen@ucla-cs (05/01/86)
In article <133@umix.UUCP>, emv@umix.UUCP (Edward Vielmetti) writes: > I ordered it as soon as the little blue Borland flyer showed up > .... I bought it yesterday and it looks like a nice system. Lots of example programs etc.. Also modules and types. Have not had the time for any deeper analysis, though. -- Koenraad Lecot p.s. I bought it at the Long Beach AI show for $75. Could not resist...
ljz@well.UUCP (Lloyd Zusman) (05/08/86)
[ "line eater"? what's that? ] With regard to Turbo Prolog ... I'm a bit disappointed. It's a compiler ONLY, no interpreting allowed. You must declare all predicates and domains you define. There are standard predicates and standard domains (such as "integer", "symbol", "real", etc.), though. You can't assert clauses, only facts. For example, asserta(person(man, me)). ... is legal (if "person(symbol, symbol)" is declared previously), but asserta((person(X,me):-male(X,me))). ... is not. Constructs such as [1, [dog, cat], [1, 2, 3], ["string"]] ... aren't legal, because lists must be made of items of the same type (i.e., integers, reals, symbols, etc.). Plus, even if the list was modified as follows, [1, [10, 20], [1, 2, 3], [999]] ... it would only be legal if its exact shape was declared previously. I think these considerations reduce the usefulness of Turbo Prolog quite a bit. In its defense, it's a slick development system, with a built-in editor and debugger. But it's limited enough that I have to consider it a "toy" Prolog. I think Turbo Prolog will do a lot to stimulate sales of other, more complete competing Prologs. A person from a company called "Arity", which makes an expensive but fairly complete Prolog implementation for the PC, claims that his compnay is overjoyed by Turbo Prolog and forsees increased sales of his product solely due to people getting exposed to Prolog and then dissatisfied by Borland's offering.