iProlog Programmer's Manual

Prolog was invented in the early seventies by Alain Colmerauer and is colleagues at the University of Marseille. Prolog stands for Programmation en Logique (Programming in Logic). Prolog differs from the most common programming languages because it is a declarative language. This means that the programer specifies a goal which is to be achieved and the Prolog interpreter/compiler works out how to achieve it. Traditional programming languages are said to be procedural. This means that the programmer must specify in detail how to solve a problem. In purely declarative languages, the programmer only states what the problem is and leaves the rest to the language itself.

Some applications of Prolog are: intelligent data base retrieval, natural language understanding, expert systems, specification language, machine learning, robot planning, graphics and problem solving .

The iProlog version of Prolog includes a number of extensions intended to make it a powerful environment for data mining as well as logic programming. These extensions include a library of machine learning tools, ripple down rules, a frame language and functional notation.

Introduction to Prolog Programming

Reference Manual

Extensions

Warning! The extensions described in the pages below are not part of standard Prolog. They are unique to iProlog.