Microsoft Common Lisp?

[Holger Schauer]

Hi !

In comp.lang.lisp Fergus discussed some differences between
Turbo Prolog (nowadays called Visual Prolog) and (ISO-)Prolog.

>>"FH" == Fergus Henderson wrote on 9 Feb 1997 09:01:28 GMT:

 >>  NO, I strongly disagree here. C and Fortran appear to me to
 >> differ more than Visual Prolog differs from standard Prolog.

[snip]

 FH> So the differences between VP and Prolog seem to me to be at
 FH> least as great as the differences in Fortran and C.  Perhaps you
 FH> are placing too much emphasis on the syntax, which is about the
 FH> only aspect where C differs from Fortran more than Prolog differs
 FH> from VP.

I would be interested in which respect you would say Mercury differs
from standard prolog and from Visual Prolog. I haven't looked at
either Mercury or Visual Prolog for quite a while now (and haven't
used either of them), so this seems interesting. It is clear to me,
that Mercury is certainly not Prolog but (as I never did anything
serious with it) had always problems understanding what is totally
different and what remains unchanged. 

How does Mercury perform when it comes to handling knowledge which is
not good handled at compile-time i.e. some kind of meta-reasoning (you
know, like asserting some rule and being able to call it afterwards) ?

Holger

PS: If you like to take this to comp.lang.prolog .. do so :-)

holger_schauer :-
   mail_address("Holger.Schauer at gmd.de"),
   project("BGP-MS/AVANTI, GMD Sankt Augustin, FIT.MMK"),
   www_home_page("http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~schauer/index.html").

(^:=  A donkey came to my office. It had a theory about people anaphora...