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erlang seems like prolog for normal people
I was like “a functional programming language that’s dynamically typed… wild” and then I realised it’s just lisp with prolog syntax.
@hikari it was first implemented as a prolog DSL apparently, hence the prolog syntax ❤️
@0x2ba22e11 ohh I wondered. I knew they used prolog for prototyping, but I wasn’t sure if they just wrote the VM in prolog or something.
but hmm, I wonder how they avoided backtracking and stuff?
@hikari ah, I might be wrong
@hikari ooh! Found actual paper by Joe at https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.3972
@hikari so, it was a meta interpreter in prolog.
This style of interpreter typically (re)uses the prolog implementation's parser rather than creating its own.
Word of Joe:
> The language started as a simple meta interpreter which added notions of concurrency and
various error handling mechanisms on top of Prolog
@0x2ba22e11 ahaaa that makes a lot of sense. reusing parsers is fun