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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

> You see, the PICS standard doesn't just define support for one particular ratings scheme (RSACi). Oh, no. Instead, the PICS standard defines an entire DSL for defining custom ratings schemes.

Oh there has got to be an XKCD for that....

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There is one: https://xkcd.com/297/.

More seriously though, I'd love to know how the whole thing came about, and what was the Lisp connection/lineage that made the DSL use S-expressions.

Also, it seems Microsoft ecosystem has a bunch of such oddities pop up in unexpected places. IIRC, at some point Windows used (or is still using) some Prolog-derivative for declarative networking configuration and troubleshooting?

If you look at it with enough vagueness, I've seen some form of this at every job I've had: someone has a problem to solve, and has an idea that is fun to implement, unnecessarily flexible, and possibly Turing-complete. It's a way of getting the "I did a cool hack" dopamine hits that we nerds love so much, while still doing our jobs. Depending on how well they did at keeping their actual goal in mind, you might wind up with a very useful embedded scripting engine, or a very bad ad hoc build system for a project that did not need its own build system. (I've seen both.)

I would expect there's a large overlap between people who think Lisp and/or Prolog are cool, and people who are prone to doing this sort of thing. Non-trivial knowledge of either of those correlates strongly with being more into programming than the average developer.

> Windows NT networking installation and configuration is controlled by the file NCPA.CPL, which the user sees as the Networks icon within the Control Panel's main window. The bulk of this DLL is written in C++, but it also contains a simplified Prolog interpreter known as "Small Prolog," written by Henri de Feraudy during the late 1980s and put into the public domain. It is available through the C User's Group (Lawrence, KS).

> August 01, 1994

https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/18440929...

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft...

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/pa...

I don't think it survived past NT3.5 with NT4 having the most of the user-space hauled from Win95.

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