Advanced Prolog

This new edition of The Art of Prolog contains a number of important changes. Most background sections at the end of each chapter have been updated to take account of important recent research results, the references have been greatly expanded, and more advanced exercises have been added which have been used successfully in teaching the course. Part II, The Prolog Language, has been modified to be compatible with the new Prolog standard, and the chapter on program development has been significantly altered: the predicates defined have been moved to more appropriate chapters, the section on efficiency has been moved to the considerably expanded chapter on cuts and negation, and a new section has been added on stepwise enhancement—a systematic way of constructing Prolog programs developed by Leon Sterling. All but one of the chapters in Part III, Advanced Prolog Programming Techniques, have been substantially changed, with some major rearrangements. A new chapter on interpreters describes a rule language and interpreter for expert systems, which better illustrates how Prolog should be used to construct expert systems. The chapter on program transformation is completely new and the chapter on logic grammars adds new material for recognizing simple languages, showing how grammars apply to more computer science examples.

This second edition contains revised chapters taking into account recent research advances. More advanced exercises have been included, and "Part II The Prolog Language" has been modified to be compatible with the new Prolog standard. This is a graduate level text that can be used for self-study.

This volume was motivated by the Year of Prolog initiative, launched to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the emergence of Prolog through the work of Alain Colmerauer’s team in Marseille. The volume editors, authors, and scientific advisors and reviewers have been the leading researchers and programmers in this field over decades, and the book represents an excellent overview of the field, its successes, and its future. After a first chapter that gently introduces the Prolog programming language using examples, the next 7 papers discuss general views of the language, possible extensions for the future, and how Prolog can generally be used to solve problems; the next 5 papers explore ideas and experiences of teaching Prolog programming and then 2 papers discuss technology that has been developed for help in that teaching; the next 3 papers describe new languages based on Prolog which show future directions for logic programming; the next 5 chapters explain the applications that were the finalists for the 2022 Alain Colmerauer Prize; and the final 8 papers describe applications developed using the Prolog language, demonstrating the language’s range.

Prolog has a declarative style. A predicate definition includes both the input and output parameters, and it allows a programmer to define a desired result without being concerned about the detailed instructions of how it is to be computed. Such a declarative language offers a solution to the software crisis, because it is shorter and more concise, more powerful and understandable than present-day languages. Logic highlights novel aspects of programming, namely using the same program to compute a relation and its inverse, and supporting deductive retrieval of informa tion. This is a book about using Prolog. Its real point is the examples introduced from Chapter 3 onwards, and so a Prolog programmer does not need to read Chapters 1 and 2, which are oriented more to teachers and to students, respec tively. The book is recommended for introductory and advanced university courses, where students may need to remember the basics about logic program ming and Prolog, before starting doing. Chapters 1 and 2 were also kept for the sake of unity of the whole material. In Chapter 1 a teaching strategy is explained based on the key concepts of Pro log which are novel aspects of programming. Prolog is enhanced as a computer programming language used for solving problems that involve objects and the relationships between objects. This chapter provides a pedagogical tour of pre scriptions for the organization of Prolog programs, by pointing out the main draw backs novices may encounter.

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.

The emphasis in The Craft of Prolog is on using Prolog effectively. It presents a loose collection of topics that build on and elaborate concepts learned in a first course. Hacking your program is no substitute for understanding your problem. Prolog is different, but not that different. Elegance is not optional. These are the themes that unify Richard O'Keefe's very personal statement on how Prolog programs should be written. The emphasis in The Craft of Prolog is on using Prolog effectively. It presents a loose collection of topics that build on and elaborate concepts learned in a first course. These may be read in any order following the first chapter, "Basic Topics in Prolog," which provides a basis for the rest of the material in the book. Richard A. O'Keefe is Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also a consultant to Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.Contents: Basic Topics in Prolog. Searching. Where Does the Space Go? Methods of Programming. Data Structure Design. Sequences. Writing Interpreters. Some Notes on Grammar Rules. Prolog Macros. Writing Tokenisers in Prolog. All Solutions.

After a slow and somewhat tentative beginning, machine vision systems are now finding widespread use in industry. So far, there have been four clearly discernible phases in their development, based upon the types of images processed and how that processing is performed: (1) Binary (two level) images, processing in software (2) Grey-scale images, processing in software (3) Binary or grey-scale images processed in fast, special-purpose hardware (4) Coloured/multi-spectral images Third-generation vision systems are now commonplace, although a large number of binary and software-based grey-scale processing systems are still being sold. At the moment, colour image processing is commercially much less significant than the other three and this situation may well remain for some time, since many industrial artifacts are nearly monochrome and the use of colour increases the cost of the equipment significantly. A great deal of colour image processing is a straightforward extension of standard grey-scale methods. Industrial applications of machine vision systems can also be sub divided, this time into two main areas, which have largely retained distinct identities: (i) Automated Visual Inspection (A VI) (ii) Robot Vision (RV) This book is about a fifth generation of industrial vision systems, in which this distinction, based on applications, is blurred and the processing is marked by being much smarter (i. e. more "intelligent") than in the other four generations.