XPost: comp.lang.lisp   
   From: espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net   
      
   "wim"  writes:   
      
   > Out of curiousity, why is LISP so highly regarded in the AI field still?   
   > Pardon my ignorance, but I thought something more akin to Prolog might   
   > be better.   
      
   Prolog is fun and very good for some purposes, but IMHO it loses its   
   attractivity when you try to do larger-scale general-purpose   
   programming with it. And if you're trying to do something more than   
   pure experimentation, there's always some general-purpose programming   
   to do.  And even for ai/com.ling. tasks you lose some of the advantages   
   as soon as you try to do more than what you're immediately offered:   
   E.g. if you want a different grammar than a pure dcg grammar, your   
   parser may be just as easy to write in lisp, or if you want a   
   different logic for your reasoning component, or just a different   
   search strategy, and so on.   
      
   (but I still had fun doing prolog for my masters thesis, and did some   
    of the really fun prologish things with it, e.g. a small natural   
    language system that partly used the same code for parsing and   
    generating!)   
   --   
     (espen)   
      
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