What is the difference between languages used in artificial intelligence and other programming languages?
If you're talking about "traditional" AI programming languages like LISP and Prolog, the essential difference boils down to the language's ruling metaphor.Most standard programming languages operate on a principle of sequential and/or branching instruction execution.OTOH, the LISt Processing language (LIST) encourages its programmers to view everything (all solutions to programming problems) in the form of one or many lists.Prolog is perhaps the furthest evolution to date away from the standard, sequential-instruction programming model: in Prolog, the programmer does not explicitly spell out the sequence of operations (a.k.a., "procedure," hence "procedural languages") needed to solve a problem; instead, the problem is simply declared (hence, "declarative language"), and the language itself (or rather the engine implementing it) seeks out the solution.Nowadays, though, you'll find AI being implemented in any number of standard procedural languages -- C++, Java, even scripting languages like Perl and Python.