which language

Tim Writer tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Tue Feb 3 22:42:51 UTC 2004


"Peter L. Peres" <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> writes:

> On Sun, 1 Feb 2004, Tim Writer wrote:
> 
> > Henry already responded regarding arity and type matching for function calls.
> > However, I'm curious, why you would require this feature for implementing a
> > state machine.  The states of state machines are quite naturally described as
> ...
> 
> You are assuming I will compile it.

Not at all.

> I would like it to be interpreted, and
> possibly self-modifying. I would also like to be be spared the effort to
> write each state and each transition. Instead I'd like to be able to write
> a set of clauses for each state, each clause encoding a test and a
> transition, and possibly clauses that generate sets or subsets of such
> clauses (that would be inheritance, the Prolog way, I guess).

I'm not terribly familiar with Prolog but this sounds like a perfect job for
Lisp/Scheme.  BTW, Common Lisp (CLOS anyway) does have multimethods in the
form of generic functions.  And on a related note, Paul Graham's "On Lisp"
(which is available on line) contains an embedded implementation of Prolog.

> I could use a table or write a parser that interprets such a 'language'.
> Using functions with variable arguments (and default arguments) would be
> one easier way to implement such a thing, I think.

I'd have to see your design to understand where you're going with this.  And
maybe I'd have to be familiar with Prolog too.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
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