[OT] Prolog and Regular Expressions, Was: Re: perspective on ruby

[Kenneth McDonald]

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In article <w1_1g.73947$dW3.51498 at newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>,
>  Edward Elliott <nobody at 127.0.0.1> wrote:
>
>   
>> XML?  Conceptually (and more elegantly) covered 
>> as LISP s-expressions. 
>>     
>
> "...Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion 
> and condescension."
>     -- Verity Stob 
> <http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/01/11/exception_handling/>
>
>   
>> XSLT?  Just a bastardized spawn of Prolog.
>>     
>
> As is any kind of pattern matching, including everyone's favourite 
> regular expressions. Prolog did it all.
>   
I'm assuming you're kidding--there is a lot of difference between an RE 
that produces a highly optimized finite state machine to quickly match a 
string, and a language that uses brute-force depth-first recursion, plus 
some nonobvious tricks, to do the same thing. Like many orders of 
magnitude in execution time :-)

That said, it'd be nice if there were some easy way to access a Prolog 
engine from Python. When Prolog is appropriate, it's _really_ appropriate.


Cheers,
Ken