Prolog
lastmod 2025-12-10created 2015-05-053 edits
Prolog is a logic programming language. Its name comes from the French programmation en logique, meaning 'programming in logic'. It was developed in 1973 by Alan Colmerauer at the University of Marseille in France, and is used to solve problems about objects and the relations between objects, based on logical formulas.
Prolog takes a new form of describing computation, from the viewpoint that a program is a predicate logic formula and that computing means proving it. That is, the program itself is written in the form of logical formulas, and the processor that runs the program serves as its prover.
Because it can express inference mechanisms concisely, it is widely used in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, especially natural language processing, the field Prolog was originally created for.