Both logic programming in general and Prolog in particular have a long and fascinating history, intermingled with that of many disciplines they inherited from or catalyzed. A large body of research has been gathered over the last 50 years, supported by many Prolog implementations. Many implementations are still actively developed, while new ones keep appearing. Often, the features added by different systems were motivated by the interdisciplinary needs of programmers and implementors, yielding systems that, while sharing the “classic” core language, in particular, the main aspects of the ISO-Prolog standard, also depart from each other in other aspects. This obviously poses challenges for code portability. The field has also inspired many related, but quite different languages that have created their own communities. This article aims at integrating and applying the main lessons learned in the process of evolution of Prolog. It is structured into three major parts. First, we overview the evolution of Prolog systems and the community approximately up to the ISO standard, considering both the main historic developments and the motivations behind several Prolog implementations, as well as other logic programming languages influenced by Prolog. Then, we discuss the Prolog implementations that are most active after the appearance of the standard: their visions, goals, commonalities, and incompatibilities. Finally, we perform a SWOT analysis in order to better identify the potential of Prolog and propose future directions along with which Prolog might continue to add useful features, interfaces, libraries, and tools, while at the same time improving compatibility between implementations.
The boundary between the trusted inside and the untrusted outside blurs when a company adopts cloud computing. The organization's applications-and data-are no longer onsite, fundamentally changing the definition of a malicious insider.
12 December 2011 in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
GNU Prologis a general-purpose implementation of the Prolog language, which distinguishes itself from most other systems by being, above all else, a native-code compiler which produces stand-alone executables which do not rely on any bytecode emulator or meta-interpreter. Other aspects which stand out include the explicit organization of the Prolog system as a multipass compiler, where intermediate representations are materialized, in Unix compiler tradition.GNU Prologalso includes an extensible and high-performance finite-domain constraint solver, integrated with the Prolog language but implemented using independent lower-level mechanisms. This paper discusses the main issues involved in designing and implementingGNU Prolog: requirements, system organization, performance, and portability issues as well as its position with respect to other Prolog system implementations and the ISO standardization initiative.
8 April 2011 in Computer Science - Research and Development