Concept
Prolog
Overview
Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic. 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. A computation is initiated by running a query over the program.
Prolog was one of the first logic programming languages and remains the most popular such language today, with several free and commercial implementations available. The language has been used for theorem proving, expert systems, term rewriting, type systems, automated planning, and question answering as well as its original intended field of use, natural language processing.
Prolog is a Turing-complete, general-purpose programming language, which is well-suited for intelligent knowledge-processing applications.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The copula is the sign denoting that there is an affirmation or denial; and thereby enabling the hearer or reader to distinguish a proposition from any other kind of discourse. Thus, in the proposition, The earth is round, the Predicate is the word _round_, which denotes the quality affirmed, or (as the phrase is) predicated: _the earth_, words denoting the object which that quality is affirmed of, compose the…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Prolog is.
Any such select set is called the set of postulates, or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing else than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general conditions involved in the pattern derived from the selected postulates.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Prolog is.
It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Prolog is.
Related ideas
- First-order logic
- Artificial intelligence
- Integer
- Japanese language
- Truth value
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Logic programming
- Logical conjunction
- Logical connective
- Rational number
- Natural language
- University of Edinburgh
- Recursion
- Soundness
- Predicate (logic)
- Communications of the ACM
- Google Books
- Non-monotonic logic
- XML
- Logical consequence
- New Scientist
- Arity
- Atomic formula
- Logic
Place in the tradition
Part of Inference.