Written for those who wish to learn Prolog as a powerful software development tool, but do not necessarily have any background in logic or AI. Includes a full glossary of the technical terms and self-assessment exercises.

Logic programming has increasing significance in computer science beyond the current fashion for expert systems. This book takes a software engineering rather than an expert systems/AI approach and covers logical theory, practical programming and PROLOG im

The computer programming language Prolog is quickly gaining popularity throughout the world. Since Its beginnings around 1970. Prolog has been chosen by many programmers for applications of symbolic computation. including: D relational databases D mathematical logic D abstract problem solving D understanding natural language D architectural design D symbolic equation solving D biochemical structure analysis D many areas of artificial Intelligence Until now. there has been no textbook with the aim of teaching Prolog as a practical programming language. It Is perhaps a tribute to Prolog that so many people have been motivated to learn It by referring to the necessarily concise reference manuals. a few published papers. and by the orally transmitted 'folklore' of the modern computing community. However. as Prolog is beginning to be Introduced to large numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students. many of our colleagues have expressed a great need for a tutorial guide to learning Prolog. We hope this little book will go some way towards meeting this need. Many newcomers to Prolog find that the task of writing a Prolog program Is not like specifying an algorithm in the same way as In a conventional programming language. Instead. the Prolog programmer asks more what formal relationships and objects occur In his problem.

Addressed to readers at different levels of programming expertise, The Practice ofProlog offers a departure from current books that focus on small programming examples requiringadditional instruction in order to extend them to full programming projects. It shows how to designand organize moderate to large Prolog programs, providing a collection of eight programmingprojects, each with a particular application, and illustrating how a Prolog program was written tosolve the application. These range from a simple learning program to designing a database formolecular biology to natural language generation from plans and stream data analysis.Leon Sterlingis Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Science at Case Western ReserveUniversity. He is the coauthor, along with Ehud Shapiro, of The Art of Prolog.Contents: A SimpleLearning Program, Richard O'Keefe. Designing a Prolog Database for Molecular Biology, Ewing Lusk,Robert Olson, Ross Overbeek, Steve Tuecke. Parallelizing a Pascal Compiler, Eran Gabber. PREDITOR: AProlog-Based VLSI Editor, Peter B. Reintjes. Assisting Register Transfer Level Hardware Design, PaulDrongowski. Design and Implementation of aPartial Evaluation System, Arun Lakhotia, Leon Sterling.Natural Language Generation from Plans, Chris Mellish. Stream Data Analysis in Prolog, Stott Parker.

Provides a systematic introduction to the theory of logic programming and shows how this theory can be applied to reason about pure Prolog programs. The text includes an introduction to programming in Prolog and deals with such programming issues as determination, occur-check freedom and absence of errors. It covers both the natural interpretations of logic programming, as declarative specification and as procedure for computer execution.

What sets this book apart from others on logic programming is the breadth of its coverage. The authors have achieved a fine balance between a clear and authoritative treatment of the theory and a practical, problem-solving approach to its applications. This edition introduces major new developments in a continually evolving field and includes such topics as concurrency and equational and constraint logic programming.

This book is for people who have done some programming, either in Prolog or in a language other than Prolog, and who can find their way around a reference manual. The emphasis of this book is on a simplified and disciplined methodology for discerning the mathematical structures related to a problem, and then turning these structures into Prolog programs. This book is therefore not concerned about the particular features of the language nor about Prolog programming skills or techniques in general. A relatively pure subset of Prolog is used, which includes the 'cut', but no input/output, no assert/retract, no syntactic extensions such as if then-else and grammar rules, and hardly any built-in predicates apart from arithmetic operations. I trust that practitioners of Prolog program ming who have a particular interest in the finer details of syntactic style and language features will understand my purposes in not discussing these matters. The presentation, which I believe is novel for a Prolog programming text, is in terms of an outline of basic concepts interleaved with worksheets. The idea is that worksheets are rather like musical exercises. Carefully graduated in scope, each worksheet introduces only a limited number of new ideas, and gives some guidance for practising them. The principles introduced in the worksheets are then applied to extended examples in the form of case studies.