
My Life as a Prolog Implementor - nickb
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/ALP//newsletter/feb08/content/Historical/content.html
======
silentbicycle
Does anybody have any recommendations for intros to Prolog? (There are several
that come up when I google for "prolog intro", yes, but are any especially
recommended? I'm skimming several of them, but many seem quite old, etc. I
know it's an old language, though.) I don't know much about it beyond the
"implementing a subset of Prolog in Lisp" stuff in e.g. the Reasoned Schemer.
It looks very different from the other stuff I've used, in a very mind-
expanding way.

I'd get something like _The Art of Prolog_, but I'd like to get a small taste
of it first.

~~~
parenthesis
I've only dabbled in Prolog so far, but enough to be able to thoroughly
recommend the book _Clause and Effect_ by Clocksin. As one of the amazon
reviewers says 'It serves roughly the same purpose for the Prolog language
that "The Little Schemer" serves for Scheme.'

[http://www.amazon.com/Clause-Effect-Programming-Working-
Prog...](http://www.amazon.com/Clause-Effect-Programming-Working-
Programmer/dp/3540629718)

For a preliminary taste, this online tutorial seems quite good:

[http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-
now/lpnpa...](http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-
now/lpnpage.php?pageid=online)

You might also like to look at this free book:

<http://www.ida.liu.se/%7Eulfni/lpp/>

~~~
silentbicycle
Thanks a bunch.

------
zandorg
One thing about Prolog is what I called 'backwards programming'. You write a
function, say, that finds a route through a subway map from one named place to
the named destination.

Once that's done, you can reverse the arguments to the function, and it can
find a route backwards.

That's the best way I can describe it.

Basically, it's pretty cool and unique out of the languages I've tried, but
you need a good teacher to get the most out of it.

