[MUD-Dev] TECH: programming languages (was: Re: TECH: STL / Heaps, etc.)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Bruce Mitchener wrote:

>   * Has anyone used Prolog or a logic language in their mud?

Richard Bartle obviously?  Anyway, there is or was, I believe, a
research project called LogiMOO around 1999 using Linda (tupple
space) for synchronization.  If my memory serves right they were
trying to find a model which affords parallelism.

In the larger logic/functional research community there currently
seems to be people exploring the potential of temporal,
possibilistic and probabilistic logic.  And how to combine that with
Horn clauses.  Then you have those that look at OO and logic. And
then you have those that look at computations bounded by time (give
me the best solution you can find for this NPC problem in 5
seconds).  When all these research efforts have matured somewhat,
then I believe we can get truly interesting MUD engines.

Another future direction is GRID. That is, a retro-movement back to
computing-centres. It makes a lot of sense to just rent time on a
truly big network of mainframes maintained by say IBM.  Then you can
ride off the peaks, and let the batch processes pay for the free
cycles.

Isn't it wonderful how old approaches resurface in new shapes? 
Everybody said micro code was dead, but it has been revitalized with
the Intel platform.  I suppose memory bus bottlenecks and increased
parallelism/die size makes it a viable approach.  And now we might
head back to mainframes, computing centres and all that...

>   * How about XSLT? (Anyone doing wireless and using this to
>   translate for the various systems?)

You are probably better off buying somebody's product :-(.

> Or is it that most from-scratch muds by hobbyists are done with
> the intent to learn C/C++/Java more than doing research into what
> might make for a more effective new type of server?

Not really sure how a different imperative implementation language
is going to get you to a new type of server?

Sure, logic programming (LP) as a subsystem would be nice, but to
model the whole world using "pure logic" horn-clauses seems to be a
little bit too inviting to white-black thinking.  And you will
quickly find yourself running out of time, unless you tweak your
code to how unification is implemented, and then what you get might
just have been implemented in C++ anyway?

Seems to me that to really reap the benefits of using LP, you will
need to adapt your universe.  And possibly go out of your way to
make sure that you use cached computations.  That makes for a fairly
static universe.  Mind you, I don't know all that much about the
various colours of LP languages and their various engines.

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/
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