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