[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> After the basic fact of generating the exclusion - a considerable
> achievement - the program should be interactive. What if the target set
> has thousands or millions of elements? There should be a loop-like way
> ('do' in Haskell, for example) to peel off the elements one-by-one and
> then terminate.
Um..."interactivity" is a bit tricky in Prolog ;)
As Geoffrey pointed out in his posting, the solutions are generated
effectively one at a time. Following is a typical example of using the
generator:
generate_member( X, ... ), do_something_with( X ), fail.
The underlying semantics is, roughly, 1) bind X, 2) do_something_with(
X ), 3) fail, meaning reject this binding of X and backtrack. In this
particular case, backtracking is tantamount to going back to 1).
You can regard ( generate_member( X, ... ) ... fail ) as the equivalent
of a loop construct, and do_something_with( X ) as the loop body. At
any given time that the goal is being evaluated, there is only one
binding for X in effect.
On a side note, Haskell's "do" notation isn't really about loops. If
you're referring to Tomasz's code, it's rather mapM_ that can sort of
be thought of as looping through the list of values returned by
generateNotMatching :)
Cheers,
Dinko
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