[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Anyway, I believe strongly that ALL people who have problems with the
Haskell protocole, and they are numerous, I teach a good sample of them,
should be encouraged to learn Prolog. IN DEPTH, and I mean it, Andrew
Coppin and Peter Hercek !
In Prolog A=B is the unification, which is a bit more than equality, and
something much more aggressive than an assignment. When you REALLY
understand unification, it will be easier to see the lazy instantiation
of the Haskell assignment, and, additionally, it becomes much more easy
to understand the automatic inference of types, which sooner or later
must be harnessed by all Haskell programmers...
I did once try to learn Prolog. And failed. Miserably.
I just couldn't bend my head around how the Prolog interpreter manages
to make seemingly "impossible" leaps of deduction. (It's a *machine*!
How can it deduce arbitrarily complex conclusions from any arbitrary set
of axioms? That requires *intelligence*!) And yet, in other, seemingly
identical cases, it utterly fails to deduce patently *obvious*
results... really weird!
And then I read a book. A golden book. (No, seriously. The cover is
gold-coloured.) It was called "The Fun of Programming". And it
demonstrates how to write a Haskell program that performs exactly the
same "impossible" feats. And now, finally, it makes sense.
(I still have no idea what the hell all that business with the "cut"
operator is though...)
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