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Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving and computational linguistics. [1] [2] [3]Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program is a set of facts and rules, which define relations.
Prolog implementations usually omit the occurs check for reasons of efficiency, which can lead to circular data structures and looping. By not performing the occurs check, the worst case complexity of unifying a term with term is reduced in many cases from (() + ()) to (((), ())); in the particular, frequent case of variable-term unifications, runtime shrinks to ().
The first Prolog program, also written in 1972 and implemented in Marseille, was a French question-answering system. The use of Prolog as a practical programming language was given great momentum by the development of a compiler by David H. D. Warren in Edinburgh in 1977.
λProlog, also written lambda Prolog, is a logic programming language featuring polymorphic typing, modular programming, and higher-order programming.These extensions to Prolog are derived from the higher-order hereditary Harrop formulas used to justify the foundations of λProlog.
Fernando Pereira and David Warren, two other early architects of Prolog, coined the term "definite clause grammar" and created the notation for DCGs that is used in Prolog today. They gave credit for the idea to Colmerauer and Kowalski, and they note that DCGs are a special case of Colmerauer's metamorphosis grammars.
The AST is represented using Prolog terms and can be used to apply optimizations, to compile such expressions to machine-code, or to directly interpret such statements. As is typical for the relational nature of predicates, these definitions can be used both to parse and generate sentences, and also to check whether a given tree corresponds to ...
In the Prolog syntactical convention a symbol starting with an upper case letter is a variable name; a symbol that starts with a lowercase letter is a function symbol; the comma is used as the logical and operator. For mathematical notation, x,y,z are used as variables, f,g as function symbols, and a,b as constants.
This is because Prolog does not know anything about Plato, and hence defaults to any property about Plato being false (the so-called closed world assumption). Finally ?- mortal(X) (Is anything mortal) would result in "Yes" (and in some implementations: "Yes": X=socrates) Prolog can be used for vastly more complicated inference tasks. See the ...