ronse@prlb2.UUCP (Ronse) (06/20/85)
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Read in `Catalogue of Artificial Intelligence Tools' (ed. Alan Bundy,
Springer-Verlag 1984) on page 38 under the title ``FORTRAN'':
FORTRAN is the programming language considered by many to be the natural
successor of LISP and Prolog for AI research. Its advantages include:
1. It is very efficient for numerical computations (many AI
programs rely heavily on number-crunching techniques).
2. AI problems tend to be very poorly structured, meaning that
control needs to move frequently from one part of a program to
another. FORTRAN provides a special mechanism for achieving
this, the so-called GOTO statement.
3. FORTRAN provides a very efficient data structure, the array,
which is particularly useful if, for example, one wishes to
process a collection of English sentences each of which has
the same length.
Maybe this text was written by a joke expert system?
maldoror@prlb2.UUCP
{enea,hirst1,inria,mcvax,munnari,philabs,seismo,unido}!prlb2!maldoror
Christian Ronse
Philips Research Laboratory Brussels
Av. E. Van Becelaere, 2 b. 8
B-1170 Brussels, Belgium