Prolog is a general purpose, declarative, logic programming language, often associated with artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, intelligent database retrieval, and problem solving. It’s widely used in research and education for natural language processing.
Automatic backtracking is one of the most characteristic features of Prolog. It’s a form of searching, fundamental to all artificial intelligence techniques. Prolog also supports multi-directional reasoning; arguments to a procedure can freely be designated inputs and outputs in different ways in different procedure calls. This is a powerful theorem-proving technique. Another key feature of Prolog is that its syntax and semantics are closer to formal logic than say Lisp.
Prolog is generally regarded as a difficult language to get to grips with. But learning the fundamentals of Prolog is definitely worthwhile.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Prolog. If you’re looking for free Prolog programming books, check here.
1. Coding Guidelines for Prolog by Michael A. Covington, Roberto Bagnara, Richard A. O’Keefe, Jan Wielemaker, and Simon Price
Coding Guidelines for Prolog provides immediate guidelines for code layout, naming conventions, documentation, proper use of Prolog features, program development, debugging and testing.
2. A Concise Introduction to Prolog by David Matuszek
Prolog is a logic language, not an algorithmic language, and one therefore has to learn to think about programs in a somewhat different way. The terminology is also somewhat different.
3. Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians by Jocelyn Ireson-Ireson-Paine
Examples include: A circuit simulator, sets implemented as unions of intervals, arbitrary precision rational arithmetic, very simple version of Bundy’s Press, family relationships, example of manual program transformation, demonstration of Prolog inference, symbolic differentiation, and uncertain reasoning.
4. Prolog Problems by Werner Hett
The purpose of this problem collection is to give you the opportunity to practice your skills in logic programming. Your goal should be to find the most elegant solution of the given problems. Efficiency is important, but logical clarity is even more crucial. Some of the (easy) problems can be trivially solved using built-in predicates. However, in these cases, you learn more if you try to find your own solution.
5. Prolog tutorial by J. R. Fisher
This tutorial is intended to be used to help learn the essential, basic concepts of Prolog. The sample programs have been especially chosen to help promote the use of Prolog programming in an artificial intelligence course.
6. A Short Tutorial on Prolog by Tamsin Treasure-Jones
This tutorial introduces some of the central concepts of Prolog under a series of topic headings.
All tutorials in this series:
Free Programming Tutorials | |
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Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
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Lua | Designed as an embeddable scripting language |
Logo | Dialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility |
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Lisp | Unique features - excellent to study programming constructs |
Ada | ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and others |
Haskell | Standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language |
Scheme | General-purpose, functional, language descended from Lisp and Algol |
Prolog | General purpose, declarative, logic programming language |
Forth | Imperative stack-based programming language |
Clojure | Dialect of the Lisp programming language |
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SQL | Access and manipulate data held in a relational database management system |
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Dylan | Multi-paradigm language, supports functional & object-oriented programming |
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Pike | Interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic language |
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Factor | Dynamic stack-based language |
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Alice | Educational language with an integrated development environment |
Agda | Dependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic type theory |
Icon | High-level, general-purpose language |
PureScript | Small strongly, statically typed language with expressive types |
Tcl | Dynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells |
Eiffel | Object-oriented language |
I haven’t used Prolog since the early 80s.