Prolog

What Does Prolog Mean?

Programmation en Logique (Programming in Logic) or Prolog is a high-level programming language that has its roots in first-order logic or first-order predicate calculus. The language was conceived in Marseilles, France in the early 1970s by a group led by Alain Colmerauer. It is one of the first logic programming languages and it remains popular today. It is a programming language commonly associated with computational linguistics and artificial intelligence and is used in expert systems, theorem proving and pattern matching over natural language parse trees and natural language processing.

Techopedia Explains Prolog

The first Prolog system was developed in 1972 by Colmerauer together with Philippe Roussel and was based on Robert Kowalski’s procedural interpretation of Horn clauses. It was also partly motivated by the desire to reconcile the use of logic as a declarative knowledge representation language with procedural representation of knowledge. Prolog was purposely developed for natural language processing – concerned with computer and human (natural) language interactions.

Prolog differs from other programming languages as it is declarative rather than sequences of commands. It is sometimes called a rule-based or declarative language since it is expressed in terms of relationships among objects' properties, presented as facts and rules. A computation is initiated by running a query over these relations.

Applications include: