Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by imtringued 1278 days ago
It is not a misnomer. You can use generators and backtracking to simulate non determinism. That means the simulator plus non deterministic algorithm are deterministic but the algorithm is not.
1 comments

The idea in Prolog and such is that you write "goal-seeking code" and it "magically" obtains the correct answer by brute force but without the brute force being syntactically/lexically apparent. But it's still brute force. It's a catchy name, but it's not accurate. It might be more accurate if "simulation" were part of the name.
As presented in the slides it's obvious that it's a generator-paradigm, thus like Icon etc. It's really just a way of making iterators very fundamental in the language. It's deterministic and you are assume to understand that. The "PROLOG style goal searching" is probably less relevant here.