|
Use of Prolog for Developing a new Programming Language. Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams. The Practical Application of Prolog. April 1-3, 1992, London.
This paper describes how Erlang was developed. The first implementation of Erlang was as a Prolog interpreter - this paper has the Prolog code for a simple meta-interpreter which was the basis for Erlang.
This extremely cool paper shows how Erlang was originally developed on top of a meta-circular Prolog interpreter. Building meta-circular interpreters in Prolog is very easy (if you are into programming languages and don't know how to do this, look up some of the previous references available in the LtU archives). Since Erlang was concieved as a multi-tasking language ("concurrency oriented programming"), the interpreter was extended so that interpretation could be stopped and resumed. This simply required building up a list of subgoals to be evaluated. And this is basically all it took to start experimenting with baby-Erlang!
Posted to Logic/Declerative by Ehud Lamm on 11/8/02; 5:55:46 AM
|
|
Use of Prolog for Developing a new Programming Language
