Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge representation paradigm based on formal logic. A logic program is a set of sentences in logical form, representing knowledge about some problem domain. Computation is performed by applying logical reasoning to that knowledge, to solve problems in the domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of clauses:
Mercury is a functional logic programming language made for real-world uses. The first version was developed at the University of Melbourne, Computer Science department, by Fergus Henderson, Thomas Conway, and Zoltan Somogyi, under Somogyi's supervision, and released on April 8, 1995.
Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
In computer science, the Boolean is a data type that has one of two possible values which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. It is a special case of a more general logical data type—logic does not always need to be Boolean.
Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a declarative, rule-based programming language, introduced in 1991 by Thom Frühwirth at the time with European Computer-Industry Research Centre (ECRC) in Munich, Germany. Originally intended for constraint programming, CHR finds applications in grammar induction, type systems, abductive reasoning, multi-agent systems, natural language processing, compilation, scheduling, spatial-temporal reasoning, testing, and verification.
A class browser is a feature of an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows the programmer to browse, navigate, or visualize the structure of object-oriented programming code.
ECLiPSe is a software system for the development and deployment of constraint logic programming applications, e.g., in the areas of optimization, planning, scheduling, resource allocation, timetabling, transport, etc. It is also suited for teaching most aspects of combinatorial problem solving, e.g., problem modeling, constraint programming, mathematical programming, and search techniques. It contains constraint solver libraries, a high-level modeling and control language, interfaces to third-party solvers, an integrated development environment and interfaces for embedding into host environments.
LispWorks is computer software, a proprietary implementation and integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language Common Lisp. LispWorks was developed by the UK software company Harlequin Ltd., and first published in 1989. Harlequin ultimately spun off its Lisp division as Xanalys Ltd., which took over management and rights to LispWorks. In January 2005, the Xanalys Lisp team formed LispWorks Ltd. to market, develop, and support the software.
Logtalk is an object-oriented logic programming language that extends and leverages the Prolog language with a feature set suitable for programming in the large. It provides support for encapsulation and data hiding, separation of concerns and enhanced code reuse. Logtalk uses standard Prolog syntax with the addition of a few operators and directives.
B-Prolog was a high-performance implementation of the standard Prolog language with several extended features including matching clauses, action rules for event handling, finite-domain constraint solving, arrays and hash tables, declarative loops, and tabling. First released in 1994, B-Prolog is now a widely used CLP system. The constraint solver of B-Prolog was ranked top in two categories in the Second International Solvers Competition, and it also took the second place in P class in the second ASP solver competition and the second place overall in the third ASP solver competition. B-Prolog underpins the PRISM system, a logic-based probabilistic reasoning and learning system. B-Prolog is a commercial product, but it can be used for learning and non-profit research purposes free of charge. B-Prolog is not anymore actively developed, but it forms the basis for the Picat programming language.
The following Comparison of Prolog implementations provides a reference for the relative feature sets and performance of different implementations of the Prolog computer programming language. A comprehensive discussion of the most significant Prolog systems is presented in an article published in the 50-years of Prolog anniversary issue of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)..
CLP(R) is a declarative programming language. It stands for constraint logic programming (real) where real refers to the real numbers. It can be considered and is generally implemented as a superset or add-on package for a Prolog implementation.
XPath is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and can be used to compute values from the content of an XML document. Support for XPath exists in applications that support XML, such as web browsers, and many programming languages.
AllegroGraph is a closed source triplestore which is designed to store RDF triples, a standard format for Linked Data. It also operates as a document store designed for storing, retrieving and managing document-oriented information, in JSON-LD format. AllegroGraph is currently in use in commercial projects and a US Department of Defense project. It is also the storage component for the TwitLogic project that is bringing the Semantic Web to Twitter data.
Ciao is a general-purpose programming language which supports logic, constraint, functional, higher-order, and object-oriented programming styles. Its main design objectives are high expressive power, extensibility, safety, reliability, and efficient execution.
SICStus Prolog is a proprietary, ISO-conforming implementation of the logic programming language Prolog. It is developed by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science since 1985 and puts a strong focus on performance and scalability.
Jan Wielemaker is a Dutch computer scientist. He initiated the SWI-Prolog implementation of the Prolog programming language in 1987 while employed at the University of Amsterdam, and he continued its development after moving to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since 2017, he has been associated with the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. In 2020, he became the Director of SWI-Prolog Solutions b.v.
Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard language for describing Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. SHACL has been designed to enhance the semantic and technical interoperability layers of ontologies expressed as RDF graphs.
BNR Prolog, also known as CLP(BNR), is a declarative constraint logic programming language based on relational interval arithmetic developed at Bell-Northern Research in the 1980s and 1990s. Embedding relational interval arithmetic in a logic programming language differs from other constraint logic programming (CLP) systems like CLP(R) or Prolog-III in that it does not perform any symbolic processing. BNR Prolog was the first such implementation of interval arithmetic in a logic programming language. Since the constraint propagation is performed on real interval values, it is possible to express and partially solve non-linear equations.
