& Tornado Alley
the Programming Language
A Language for Symbolic Computation
through the Processing of Lists
There are primarily two computer languages used in artificial intelligence work, LISP and PROLOG. LISP, which is short for List Processing, was created by John McCarthy of Stanford University. It looks klutzy but it is based upon the lamba calculus and works quite well for computation associated with artificial intelligence. PROLOG has an elegant formulation but it does not have the range of application that LISP has. The Japanese when they formulated the Fifth Generation project chose PROLOG over LISP as the programming language. This was perhaps one of the factors that contributed to the failure of the Fifth Generation project.
HOME PAGE OF Thayer Watkins