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Chapter 502
Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Second Edition
A system built into some versions of Prolog to avoid never-ending loops with unification. Whenever an attempt is made to unify a variable with a compound term, a check is made by the system to see if the variable is contained within the structure of the compound term, and if this is so, the unification will fail. For efficiency most versions of Prolog do not perform an occurs check.
Published in Chapter:
PROLOG
Bernie Garrett (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Copyright: © 2009 |Pages: 5
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch502
Abstract
Prolog is a logic based programming language, and was developed in the early 1970s and is a practical programming language particularly useful for knowledge representation and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Prolog is different from many common computer languages in that it is not a procedural language (such as Basic, C, or Java). It is an interpreted logic based declarative language and as such has no loops, jumps, type declarations or arrays, and no fixed control constructs. In the past this has led to the impression that Prolog is a restricted language, useful only for highly specialized programming tasks by enthusiasts (Callear, 1994; Krzysztof, 1997). However, this is not the case and modern versions of Prolog are well equipped and versatile, and can be used for any programming task. The latest generations of the language (e.g., Visual Prolog) can also be integrated into more common object oriented languages.
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