TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (01/05/84)
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
[in response to Herb Lin's questions]
Well, 2 more or less answers 1. One of the main reasons why Lisp and not C
is the language of many people's choice for AI work is that you can easily cons
up at run time a piece of data which "is" the next action you are going to
take. In most languages you are restricted to choosing from pre-written
actions, unless you include some kind of interpreter right there in your AI
program. Another reason is that Lisp has all sorts of extensibility.
As for 3, the obvious response is that in Pascal control has to be routed to an
IF statement before it can do any good, whereas in a production system, control
automatically "goes" to any production that is applicable. This is highly
over-simplified and may not be the answer you were looking for.
- Richarddap@ihopa.UUCP (01/17/84)
It seems to me that FORTH would be a very good AI language. It provides the same sort of runtime modifiability and extensibility that Richard talks about, it's EXTREMELY compact and I personally believe that it is easier to read (although neither LISP nor FORTH are paragons of readability). I haven't been reading net.ai much and maybe somebody has brought up this possibility, but after working with FORTH for a while, it seems like an ideal language in a lot of ways. Darrell Plank BTL-IH ihnp4!ihopa!dap