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Under a declarative reading, the order of rules, and of goals within rules, is irrelevant since logical disjunction and conjunction are commutative. Procedurally, however, it is often important to take into account Prolog's execution strategy, either for efficiency reasons, or due to the semantics of impure built-in predicates for which the ...
Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving and computational linguistics. [1] [2] [3]Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program is a set of facts and rules, which define relations.
A rule is called ground if all of its atoms (head and body) are ground. A ground rule R 1 is a ground instance of another rule R 2 if R 1 is the result of a substitution of constants for all the variables in R 2. The Herbrand base of a Datalog program is the set of all ground atoms that can be made with the constants appearing in the program.
The first Prolog program, also written in 1972 and implemented in Marseille, was a French question-answering system. The use of Prolog as a practical programming language was given great momentum by the development of a compiler by David H. D. Warren in Edinburgh in 1977.
In this tree, the lowest common ancestor of the nodes x and y is marked in dark green. Other common ancestors are shown in light green. In graph theory and computer science, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) (also called least common ancestor) of two nodes v and w in a tree or directed acyclic graph (DAG) T is the lowest (i.e. deepest) node that has both v and w as descendants, where we define ...
Fernando Pereira and David Warren, two other early architects of Prolog, coined the term "definite clause grammar" and created the notation for DCGs that is used in Prolog today. They gave credit for the idea to Colmerauer and Kowalski, and they note that DCGs are a special case of Colmerauer's metamorphosis grammars.
Prolog implementations usually omit the occurs check for reasons of efficiency, which can lead to circular data structures and looping. By not performing the occurs check, the worst case complexity of unifying a term with term is reduced in many cases from (() + ()) to (((), ())); in the particular, frequent case of variable-term unifications, runtime shrinks to ().
In SL resolution, the other parent is either an input clause or an ancestor clause earlier in the sequence. In both SL and SLD, "S" stands for the fact that the only literal resolved upon in any clause is one that is uniquely selected by a selection rule or selection function. In SL resolution, the selected literal is restricted to one which ...