IUBio

Diagramming Robust AI

William Tanksley wtanksle at sdcc10.ucsd.edu
Wed Apr 1 01:46:00 EST 1998


In article <35209173.1533183 at news> kochenbu at khe.scn.de (Andreas Kochenburger) writes:
>If I can still remember correctly (coming into "the years" meanwhile)
>Prolog was once belonging to the Fifth Generation Language Project.
>Prolog's main fantastic thing was its simple inference machine
>combined with pattern matching or unification.

>F.ex. with unification in Forth we could define
>: ROT (S a b c -- b c a ) ;
>and be ready, because the compiler did evaluate the stack diagram by
>matching variables of the same name.

I'm not sure I'd call that unification.

>IMO this - and a standardized OOF mechanism - on top of Forth would be
>worth to be called a successor of Forth - perhaps 5th?

Perhaps.  I'd rather call it Forth With Unification.  :)

>Andreas

>P.S. Did anybody in the past try to power up the Forth compiler by
>adding unification capabilities or evaluating stack annotations?

Yes.  It (stack annotation) is suprisingly easy; I made Pygmy Forth do it
in one night of programming (okay, I spent two debugging and repenting of
my desire for features).  My syntax went like this:

STACK: DUP  a--aa
STACK: 3REV  abc--cba

There was also a version which was going to work anonymously right in the
middle of a word; I never really got going on that one, simply because I
was being SUCH a performance freak.  Specifically, I was simply assembling
pushes and pops in the appropriate order.

-Billy



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