Treffer: PROLOG IN 10 FIGURES.

The article considers the Programming in Logic (Prolog) language for designing future computers. Prolog was created over a decade ago at the Faculty of Sciences at Luminy in Marseilles, France. The creators' original objective was to integrate a development in mathematical logic into a programming language. The principles governing Prolog's original design were based both on language theory and on traditional mathematical logic. However, the close link with logic, which was originally an asset, became increasingly burdensome when implementing Prolog on a computer. Because of this, some more practical constraints were incorporated, and the resulting language, unencumbered by details needed only in logic provided a theoretical model of fundamental importance. When computers were used only to perform numerical computations, the computations were initially specified in machine language. Later on special languages such as Fortran were employed. But to implement higher-level languages, improvements were necessary in the processing of the structure of the language itself. Solving a problem using Prolog amounts to first describing the universe in which the problem is placed and then asking pertinent questions, instead of giving a recipe for computing the solution.