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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Thanks for journaling about this so I can read it from afar. Very good slides.

    This has motivated me to install the Münster Curry compiler [uni-muenster.de], a Haskell implementation of the Haskell-Prolog hybrid language Curry [uni-kiel.de].

    I suspect it'll be a lot of fun reading about it. As for application programming, it seems that much of the semantic web stuff -- RDF in particular -- corresponds closely to logic programming models, so that might be a good vector to explain to people.

    • I suppose a comparison to the semantic web might help some people. But I'm still banging my head at Practical RDF [oreilly.com], with little success. Some ideas just don't seem to want to fit in my head. :-(

      -Dom

    • I'm glad you liked the slides. I've been hearing a bit about Curry and I should dig into it. Incidentally, you may be interested in the response I just made to Dom. I list a couple of Prolog/RDF links which may prove interesting.

      • I especially like how Curry reuses all Haskell syntax, but managed to express the logical paradigm through it. The key seems to be the free variable annotation and the =:= equivalence operator.

        In Perl 6, this might be:

        my $x is free;
        $x + 3 === 4;
        say $x; # 1

        Does this seem sane to you? I wonder if P6L can handle this. :-)

        • Well, there does seem to be a strong desire to get logical programming into P6, so I suspect that well-thought out proposals will be welcomed. The major problem I have in participating is two-fold. First, I simply don't have the experience with P6 to be able to make contributions that are going to fit well in the current model. Second, I fear that most who are involved are considerably brighter than I am. This makes me a poor sounding board for ideas. (I'm not trying to present this as false modesty.

          • I like the ` twigil -- the is free syntax is from Curry, but I think twigil fits Perl6 better.

            To define last with append in Curry, we write:

            append [] ys = ys
            append (x:xs) ys = x : append xs ys

            last l
                | append xs [x] =:= l
                = x
                where x, xs free

            Translating this to Perl6:

            multi append ([], @ys) { @ys }
            multi append ([*$x, *@xs], @ys) {
                ($xs, append @xs, @ys)
            }
            sub last ($l) {
                my ($`x, @`xs);
                append(@`xs, [$`x]) === $l;
               

            • Er, sorry, it should be @l in that last:

              sub last (@l) {
                  my ($`x, @`xs);
                  append(@`xs, [$`x]) === @l;
                  $`x;
              }

              The trick of Curry is to introduce a special type, Success, that encapsulates constraint solutions. I'm still working through the tutorial [uni-kiel.de], so it will take a bit before coherent thoughts emerge...

            • OK, I'm definitely liking this better. I think it can work. Is multi enough, though? Would assert or something similar be a better keyword so Perl can know that it's working with a fact or rule?

    • Thank you very much for the excellent slides about a topic that I share your excitement about.

      Is it possible to have the slides published as PDF or a single HTML page, so I can print them and read them/attempt to understand them ?

      I expect there are probably a lot of good reasons not to (maybe I should download the modules instead), but having the ability to do some logic programming in Perl would be cool beyond comprehension (caveat knowing when to use, caveat backtracking cost etc).

      Thank you very mu

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