About
Prolog was designed by Alain Colmerauer in Marseille France and developed by Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel in 1972. Colmerauer was a French computer scientist and Professor at Aix-Marseille University. The name Prolog was chosen by Roussel to be short for "Programming in Logic".
Prolog is a general-purpose, logic/rule-based progamming language known for use in expert systems, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog is typically used as a declarative programming language where the logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. A query is then run over these relations.
It has been reported that there has been some preference for Prolog by European AI researchers and programmers with Lisp being preferred by American counterparts. Lisp was specified in 1958 making it the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today - second only by one year to Fortran. Lisp was designed by John McCarthy and developed by Steve Russell, Timothy Hart and Mike Levin. McCarthy was an American computer scientist, among the founders of artificial intelligence and recipient of the Turing Award, the United States National Medal of Science and the Kyoto Prize. Russell is an American computer scientist famous creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest, if not the first, video game.
Implemetations
There are many implemetations of Prolog. These implentations can be very different syntax. Among the implemetations are the following:
- BProlog
- Ciao
- DOS-PROLOG
- ECLiPSe
- GNU Prolog
- Open Prolog
- Poplog Prolog
- Strawberry Prolog
- SWI-Prolog
- Visual Prolog
- XSB Prolog