ActionScript as a teaching language

[Christopher Browne]

On 12/31/05, Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
>
> > Peter wrote:
> >
> >> SWI Prolog + parser/lexer library + Tk bindings ?
> >
> > I didn't think it was possible to have a nastier syntax than my imagined
> > Perl/GFA Basic/PostScript sort-of hybrid, but Prolog takes the cake. It
> > doesn't look like any other programming language.
>
> It looks like Horn clauses. Or like C-notation lambda expressions with
> ':-', ',', '.' and ';' replacing a lot of parentheses. Or like plain
> math function descriptions. Which are more or less the same thing. Be
> f(x) = {x for x>=0, -x for x<0 }. Except the functions can be symbolic.
> neighbors(A,B,[L]) = { ... }. Writing a simple parser that parses a
> problem setup as above into valid Prolog is failry easy and could be a
> part of the default library. More importantly Prolog can explain what it
> is doing while running. With a simple filter to reduce the verbosity of
> a trace or explain it should be very helpful.
>
> I don't think that this is a crazy idea. According to links posted on
> this list yesterday, using the highest level available language is the
> best idea. Prolog is certainly high level. For non-symbolic calculus
> only maybe Matlab or Scilab could be considered.

Another option would be Erlang.

It has much of the "Prolog nature," notably including the notion that
data is immutable, once values have been determined.  In effect, you
don't have "variables;" you bind values to names.

Unlike Prolog, which generally tries to be as near as possible to
untyped (sort of like Perl and Tcl), Erlang is strongly typed.  It is
similar to ML in that type information can commonly be inferred; you
often do not need to declare the types.

And there are substantial applications written in Erlang; Ericsson has
been known to implement phone switches in the language, which is an
enormously-parallel application if there ever was one.
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