Comments on: Language of the Month: Prolog

By: Language of the Month: Prolog, part 2 « ClickedyClick

Language of the Month: Prolog, part 2 « ClickedyClick — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:39:37 +0000

[…] something, then this is a belated post. Prolog was the language of July and now it's September. Anyway, before I completely fail, let's just wrap it up and go on the next […]

By: Irvins

Irvins — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:32:00 +0000

In reply to Gergely Imreh.

Hmmm. I’m not sure they allow access to ftp from outside the network. You might have to use http://members.shaw.ca/irvinsh/prolog.tar.gz

By: Irvins

Irvins — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:40:00 +0000

In reply to Gergely Imreh.

You can download it if you like from http://ftp.shaw.ca/irvinsh/prolog.tar.gz

The compile A to B approach has enourmous advantages in portability, especially if B is C (heh heh). There’s a documentation file in the tree at prolog/lib/prolog.html

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 02:14:00 +0000

In reply to IrvinS.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion, finally found the book. Feels like they don’t write books like this anymore, reading the intro and beginning it just has a great style. :)

Can you give me a link to some more info about the compiler? Looks very interesting and also a good thing to compare, in this Language of the Month series since so many of these languages use the compile-lang-A-to-lang-B way to improve speed or usability.

The family tree was a bad excuse for an example to show a little bit of the syntax, something simple that still shows how things look. Yeah, not surprised that you are using it for everything, wasn’t even one of the first Prolog compilers written in Prolog? I think I read that in the Art of Prolog. Probably the biggest difficulty when I’m learning a new language for learning’s sake, to figure out what does it excel at, what it can be used for. That does not come from tutorials but experience and needs more than 1 month. Prolog so far is pretty mind-blowing for me, I’m sure I will keep it up later as well.

By: IrvinS

IrvinS — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 07:05:00 +0000

For a more programmer-oriented book on Prolog, I highly recommend Richard A. O’Keefe’s “The Craft of Prolog”. He doesn’t focus on the academic approach, but beautifully shows how to write clear, efficient, elegant code in Prolog.

I share your apparent discomfort with a strictly interactive implementation. Back in the late ’80s I wrote a more conventional compile, link, & run Prolog compiler, which I’ve been using and maintaining ever since. It produces a C source file as output, which is compiled & linked with the Prolog runtime library. The result is an ordinary program, invoked like any other. It also contains an interface definition language with a stub compiler that automatically generates stubs for calling C functions from Prolog, or allowing C code to call a Prolog predicate as though it were a normal C function.

It was born on Unix, for a time was developed & used under Windows, but I’ve gone home to Linux & have been supporting it on that exclusively for the last 10 yrs. GPL licensed, by the way.

By the way, I don’t use it for family trees, but for pretty much everything. (I’ve even written an experimental shell in Prolog.