This didactical course refers to a quick tutorial for the PROLOG programming language, a language often employed in Artificial Intelligence applications. This course takes advantage from the resources and the technologies of the Internet. It is meant for IC Technologies and Mathematics educators in the secondary schoools or also for self taught pupils. Having in mind that all the linked sites offer PROLOG tutorials that do not presuppose IC or programming knowledges, this didactical course in principle should not be focused on professional computer programmers. It is however always very agreable to learn something in a pleasant way and surfing in the linked sites outside the tutorials could lead the user to important specialized information : due to these previously mentioned reasons the IC professionals could as well find this course interesting.

The resources on the web

Prolog is a logical and a declarative programming language. The name itself, Prolog, is short for PROgramming in LOGic. Prolog's heritage includes the research on theorem provers and other automated deduction systems developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The inference mechanism of Prolog is based upon Robinson's resolution principle (1965) together with mechanisms for extracting answers proposed by Green (1968). These ideas came together forcefully with the advent of linear resolution procedures. Explicit goal-directed linear resolution procedures, such as those of Kowalski and Kuehner (1971) and Kowalski (1974), gave impetus to the development of a general purpose logic programming system. The "first" Prolog was "Marseille Prolog" based on work by Colmerauer (1970). The first detailed description of the Prolog language was the manual for the Marseille Prolog interpreter (Roussel, 1975). The other major influence on the nature of this first Prolog was that it was designed to facilitate natural language processing. Prolog is the major example of a fourth generation programming language supporting the declarative programming paradigm. The Japanese Fifth-Generation Computer Project, announced in 1981, adopted Prolog as a development language, and thereby focused considerable attention on the language and its capabilities. The programs in this tutorial are written in "standard" (University of) Edinburgh Prolog, as specified in the classic Prolog textbook by authors Clocksin and Mellish (1981,1992). The other major kind of Prolog is the PrologII family of Prologs which are the descendants of Marseille Prolog. There are differences between these two varieties of Prolog; part of the difference is syntax, and part is semantics. However, students who learn either kind of Prolog can easily adapt to the other kind.

This tutorial available at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, site is intended to be used to help learn the essential, basic concepts of Prolog. The sample programs have been especially chosen to help promote the use of Prolog programming in an artificial intelligence course. Lisp and Prolog are the most frequently used symbolic programming languages for artificial intelligence. They are widely regarded as excellent languages for "exploratory" and "prototype programming".

This link leads the educator to an interesting Logic Programming site that contains several pointers to information available around the world on the World Wide Web, some of which is really very valuable. The information that can be reached is organized as follows :

General repositories

Prolog

Window system interfaces

Other logic programming systems

Meetings

Books

Related information

This other link leads the educator and/or the Internet user to a very compact and well conceived PROLOG tutorial.

Let us now see examine a new site and read what the author self of this site ( a professor at the University of Prag and director of the Constraint & Logic Programming Research Group) says about it : “Welcome to the On-line Guide to Prolog Programming designed and maintained by Roman Barták. I opened this site as a contribution to the evolving area of logic programming languages and PROLOG in particular. It is meant to be an introduction to logic programming and PROLOG for beginners but I also expect to cover some advanced topics. It's not meant as an unclassified collection of links to other pages although I also include some interesting links here but mainly as a tool for a seminar on programming in Prolog that I used to give in winter term (semester).To support learning of Prolog I prepared an on-line tutorial (in English) with information on Prolog programming language and lectures for novices”.

More than a site with material of interest for an educator this is a commercial site for a PROLOG language version originally developed for the Siemens company. This version however seems very attracting for Internet and Intranet applications, with free evaluation downloading. Here again let us report what the developers (and the sellers) claim : “the metatags for this site are : Prolog in Java. e-Commerce, e-Government, Knowledge Management, Help Desks, Expert Advice, Infomediation, Case Based Reasoning, Resource Allocation, Web hosted services, Web Brokers, Intelligent Agents. When evaluation, simulation, advice, consulting is central to your business mission, whenever you want to provide services, not just data, through internet browsers, MINERVA is the tool for you. ISO-13211-1 Prolog compiler and executive hosted in Java, MINERVA is a commercial programming system for large private or public intelligent client-server applications on the internet.”

Although this site is located in France, it is in the english language and is the official GNU-Prolog site, a Prolog version developed by Daniel Diaz, professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

A further version of the PROLOG language offers Prolog Development Center (a danish company): the educators and the schools have the opportunity to learn Visual Prolog by using a free Personal Edition.

And now Ladies and Gentlemen a very interesting site for learning PROLOG. Let us see what the authors, Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos and Kristina Striegnitz say about their course “Learn Prolog Now!” “This is the first draft of a new course on Prolog. It is based on our experience of teaching Prolog at the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of the Saarland, over the past four years. We wanted to do two things with this course. First, we wanted to provide a text that was relatively self contained, a text that would permit someone with little or no knowledge of computing to pick up the basics of Prolog with the minimum of fuss. We also wanted the text to be clear enough to make it useful for self study. We believe that if you read the text, and do the associated exercises, you will gain a useful partial entry to the world of Prolog. But only a partial entry, and this brings us to our second point that we want to underscore. You can't learn a programming language simply by reading about it, and if you really want to get the most out of this course, we strongly advise you to get hold of a Prolog interpreter (you'll find pointers to some nice ones on this website) and work through all the Practical Sessions that we provide. And of course, don't stop with what we provide. The more you program, the better you'll get.... “ This course also exists in a Postscript version and in a PDF version for printing.