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My Life as a Prolog Implementor (kuleuven.ac.be)
17 points by nickb on Aug 17, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



Does anybody have any recommendations for intros to Prolog? (There are several that come up when I google for "prolog intro", yes, but are any especially recommended? I'm skimming several of them, but many seem quite old, etc. I know it's an old language, though.) I don't know much about it beyond the "implementing a subset of Prolog in Lisp" stuff in e.g. the Reasoned Schemer. It looks very different from the other stuff I've used, in a very mind-expanding way.

I'd get something like _The Art of Prolog_, but I'd like to get a small taste of it first.


I've only dabbled in Prolog so far, but enough to be able to thoroughly recommend the book Clause and Effect by Clocksin. As one of the amazon reviewers says 'It serves roughly the same purpose for the Prolog language that "The Little Schemer" serves for Scheme.'

http://www.amazon.com/Clause-Effect-Programming-Working-Prog...

For a preliminary taste, this online tutorial seems quite good:

http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-now/lpnpa...

You might also like to look at this free book:

http://www.ida.liu.se/%7Eulfni/lpp/


Thanks a bunch.


One thing about Prolog is what I called 'backwards programming'. You write a function, say, that finds a route through a subway map from one named place to the named destination.

Once that's done, you can reverse the arguments to the function, and it can find a route backwards.

That's the best way I can describe it.

Basically, it's pretty cool and unique out of the languages I've tried, but you need a good teacher to get the most out of it.




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