Adventures in Prolog

Posted on 28 Jan 2014

Over the past couple days, I’ve been banging my head against the wall, trying to understand the logic programming language Prolog (or more specifically, SWI-Prolog) for our CS162 Programming Languages class.

What is Prolog?

Prolog is a declarative programming language. It operates by performing queries against given facts and relations, somewhat similar to database query languages like SQL. An example of Prolog:

    man(adam).
    man(peter).
    woman(alice).
    woman(mary).
    woman(sara).
    parent(adam, peter).
    parent(adam, mary).
    parent(adam, sara).
    parent(alice, peter).
    parent(alice, mary).
    parent(alice, sara).

    father(F, C) :- man(F), parent(F, C).
    mother(M, C) :- woman(M), parent(M, C).
    siblings(A, B) :- parent(P, A), parent(P, B), A \= B.

This example illustrates a family of 5; Adam and Alice have three children, named Peter, Mary, and Sara.

In Prolog, identifiers beginning with lowercase letters are known as atoms or constants. adam is an atom.

Identifiers beginning with capital letters are variables. F, M, C are a few of the variables in this example. Note that variables can be more than one letter, like Dog.

Functions in the language are known as predicates; they take one or more parameters and return a boolean value.

In the above example, father, mother, and siblings are obviously predicates. But notice man, woman, and parent. These are also predicates; man(adam). signals that when the predicate man is used with atom adam, it will always return true.

What’s interesting is that predicates can be called with an uninitialized variable. In this case, Prolog conducts a search for all possible values for that variable that cause the predicate to return true. For example, the query:

    ?- siblings(peter, Siblings).

returns:

    Siblings=[mary, sara].

To programmers more familiar with the imperative style, Prolog presents a vastly different perspective.

More Resources

Some resources I found useful for learning Prolog:

Learn Prolog Now! – Great tutorial for getting started.
SWI-Prolog Manual – SWI-Prolog manual pages provide a quick reference for looking up functions and parameters.
StackOverflow – As with anything else programming related, StackOverflow is here to help.

abstractOwl .github