This Prolog Life ...

"Prolog is more than a language - it is a way of living :-)" Bart Demoen

Prolog

Ever since I first learned Prolog, more than 20 years ago, it has been my preferred programming language.

Why use Prolog?

Prolog is a tool for solving problems, rather than producing "software products", and it will appeal to you if:

• You want your programs to be readable, and have a close correspondence with their specifications;
• Statements like x = x + 1 offend your mathematical sensibility;
• You like to develop programs incrementally - with an interactive top-level, interactive debugging, and the ability to test (execute) program fragments independently;
• You want fewer lines of code and (therefore) fewer faults;
• You prefer to work with a handful of big ideas, rather than a lot of small ones;

If you want to find out about Prolog on the Web, start with the Frequently Asked Questions for comp.lang.prolog.

Other useful links include:

• Logic Programming and the Internet. Prolog is unequalled as a language for expressing queries and integrity constraints, and for processing text, which make it an excellent choice for Internet applications.
• XML documents and Prolog terms have the same "tree" structure, which makes it easy to program with XML and Prolog. This free Prolog/XML translation code makes it even easier.
• Recommended Prolog programming books.
• My solutions to some puzzles in Prolog:
  • Water Jugs,
  • Counterfeit Coin,
  • Cheating Linguists?,
  • Mister X,
  • Zoom Tracks,
  • Whodunit?
• Quintus Prolog provides optimizations and extensions that support and encourage a clear and elegant style of programming. It's fast, extremely reliable, and able to handle very large programs.

Although Prolog is regarded as a niche language, it's a very versatile language. I believe that the programming languages used 50 years from now will owe a lot more to Prolog than to Java, C or any of the other languages that are currently popular.