Re: Books or Implementations and ISO Prolog.

José Rui Faustino de Sousa wrote:

These two have very good reviews:

"The Art of PROLOG" Sterling

"The Craft of PROLOG" O'Keefe

but are older than the standard so I guess that they just cover some
dialect.

They cover basically DEC-10 Prolog which was to some extent the basis
for ISO part 1


These two also have good reviews especially Bratko:

"Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence" Bratko

Also pre-ISO I think.




The only book I could find that specifically mentions ISO Prolog is:

"Programming in PROLOG" Mellish

However, is it just part 1 or part 1 and 2?


Definitely not part 2. And it is poor in its explanation/use of part 1;
see a review of the book at
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/projects/ALP/TPLP/TPLP_CONTENTS/BookReviews.html



In another note I have looked at Prolog implementations and although
some vendors claim a strong interest in ISO Prolog I could find no
implementation claiming to adhere to part 2



Have I just missed some important implementation? On the other hand, is
there some reason for this apparent disregard for the ISO standard?


It is possible that IF-Prolog implements part 2 (besides part 1 of
course). But major players (SICStus commercial, and SWI open) are not
prepared to take on the modules part. OTOH, their module systems are
so similar, and close to another (old) de-facto standard (the one from
Quintus) that people in general don't care about part 2. For historical
reasons, many Prolog systems have a predicate based module system.
Part 2 tried to clean up some stuff in it, but complicated
matters even more than they were. So now Prolog is stuck with a bad
standard on modules, and a suboptimal practice. But if you use it
wisely, it will hardly ever bite you.

Cheers

Bart Demoen
.

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