Book review: Prolog: The Standard Reference Manual By E Deransart, A. Ed-Dbali, and L. Cervoni (Springer-Verlag, 1996)

ABSTRACT

The ISO Prolog standard took 10 ars to produce. For a language II that, on its face, is both simple and logical this seems like a long time to spend on standardization. While this book is in no sense a history of the standardization of Prolog, it does provide some insight into why the process took so long. Anyone who has tried to learn Prolog knows that to use the language effectively one must have a sound understanding of the computational model. (Of course, this is true of any programming language, but for Protog it seems to be especially so.) The standards group was to find plenty of room for dispute over the computational model. A major service that this book performs is to provide a clear description of the Prolog inference engine.

REFERENCES

• 1: ISO/IEC 13211-1. Information Technology---Programming Languages---Prolog---Part 1: General Core 1995.
• 2: William F. Clocksin , C. S. Mellish, Programming in PROLOG, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 1994