Subject: RE: UNDERSTANDING LISTS

From: Dan Brickley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 03:56:33 -0400 (EDT)

>     - The expansion of the net.  Programmers started wanting HTML parsers,
>       CGI support, CORBA interfaces, interface to Active/X, you name it.
>       Most Prologs didn't have it, and most of these interfaces were
>       really designed with assignment-based languages in mind.  Take the
>       W3C's Document Object Model, for example.  It couldn't be less
>       suited to implementation in a declarative language if they'd sat
>       down and worked it out on _both_ hands for a month.

That's as maybe, but the expansion of the net in itself IMHO works for
rather than against languages in the declarative tradition. There are
other specs beyond DOM. Take the W3C's Resource Description Framework, for
another example. RDF is rather more suited to declarative implementation,
see various links from 
http://www.w3.org/RDF/ and http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ or
http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/inference.html

Possibly a bit off topic for a first post,

Dan

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