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qohen | 1 month ago

By 1979 at the latest -- probably closer to 1975 -- the primary Prolog implementation of the day (Warren's DEC-10 version) had an interpreter, where you could load files of code in and modify the code and you had a REPL with the ability to do all kinds of things.

I posted an excerpt of the manual, with a link to a PDF of it, in a reply to another comment [0]

(And, since even the earliest versions of Prolog were interpreted, they may've had features like this too).

And, as far as editors are concerned, people still use versions of vi (and, of course, emacs) to this day by people who don't necessarily do lots of planning and correctness before deciding to input the code into the computer.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664671

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qohen|1 month ago

And one other thing: just because early Prolog interpreters were implemented on punchcards doesn't mean that Prolog programs run by those interpreters needed to be. It's quite possible that basically nobody ever wrote Prolog programs using punchcards, given that Prolog has the ability to read in files of code and data.